I never formally learned how to negotiate: no business school, no training in back channels, leverage, and persuasion tactics. Still, I managed to learn the craft of it, partly through living life and partly through observing up close a very ethical and effective businessman, Sy Safransky, the founder of The Sun magazine. If there is one thing I know about negotiation, it is that determining value isn’t always about adding up dollars and cents.
Such was the case in the journey to publish David Bedrick’s newly released book, The Unshaming Way: A Compassionate Guide to Dismantling Shame. From the moment I first read the proposal, I knew that David’s approach to defanging shame was revolutionary.
Still, as is often the case in book publishing, I wasn’t the only one who thought this way. There were other publishers on the hunt. What could we do to stand out?
The first thing I knew we had to do was to not try to stand out. My logic has always been: If what I have to offer is any good, then it will speak for itself when presented clearly. It doesn’t need primping and pumping up. In fact, repeated bell-ringing on value usually suggests something else is afoot.
I’m not talking about an affected nonchalance, like, “We are who we are, David, take it or leave it.” No, it is more inviting than that, more like, “These are the books we publish, David. These are the people you would collaborate with. This is how we work and the passions and values we bring to the table.” And being willing to calmly and transparently answer any and every question David threw my way as he did his due diligence and kicked every tire.
David and I talked and wrote a lot over those weeks. We developed and felt kinship, something that for me transcends identity and is more about recognizing the tattered and beautiful soul animating the other person. This does not happen by magic (although I do think there is something to be said for immediate affinity); it comes from and through authentic and vulnerable sharing between people.
In David and my case, he talked about how important this book was to him and how in many ways it was his life’s work. In return I talked to him about how our approach is to always hold “honoring the book” as our highest ideal, which is less about giving an author what they want or insisting on what we want and instead imagining that if the book could talk, what would it say? What cover and title and editing and price and back-cover copy would make it look into the mirror before walking out in the world and say, “OK, I’m ready for the battle of reaching people’s souls!” Because there are a lot of books out there strutting their stuff; what resonates with readers may be less how flashy the book is and more how much its gestalt matches its guts. That’s our commitment. We live and die on that hill.
So we made David an offer. As a 50-year-old nonprofit aiming to exist for many more decades (if not centuries!) our offers are competitive, but our advances are modest. Not surprisingly to me, a larger house with a different business model offered David a higher advance. I did what I could to sweeten the deal and get our advance closer to theirs, bringing it to the top of what we can offer and still remain sustainable. Unfortunately (for us, it seemed), when the other publisher learned we had increased our advance, they tripled theirs. They wanted to pour wads of upfront money into David’s hands.
He told me later, “My agent told me to take their offer. My father’s spirit on my shoulder told me to take it. Every part of me that equates money with value told me to take it.”
But he didn’t. Instead he chose us. He chose to believe me when I said that we publish books for the long haul and not along trend lines, which means that even though our advances are modest, our royalty checks come for years and years and years, and that sometimes our highest sales for a book come many years after it first came out. (See Regretting Motherhood and These Wilds Beyond Our Fences.) He chose to believe me when I said that we only do books that earn collective buy-in from staff, because getting books to fly in a crowded airspace is hard and that therefore every nudge from every person touching the book is essential to take off. He chose to believe me when I told him that his book fit into our list not because of how shiny it was or how many social media followers he had but because of how authentic and necessary The Unshaming Way is.
For years I used the same mechanic in Oakland for my old Honda Accord. Albert from Auto Repair Master wasn’t the cheapest, or the fastest, but from the moment I first shook his hand I felt that kinship. I once caught a glimpse of the way he pulled my car into the bay after I left it with him. Something about the way he sat up in the seat and gently guided the old jalopy into his garage showed me everything I needed to know. I still remember the haiku I wrote about Albert all those years ago: honest businessman / fixes car well / feel it in his grip
The way David’s and my eyes met over Zoom that first time we talked: it was something like that.
—Tim McKee, publisher of North Atlantic Books
“In this astute work, David Bedrick provides a deep investigation of shame, the most debilitating of our mind states, and offers a workable, practice-based, and accessible path to divesting ourselves from it.”
—Gabor Maté, MD, New York Times best-selling author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts