The biggest mistakes I’ve made as a business owner could have been avoided if I’d done one thing before doing business with someone else.
I should have shared a long meal (or even a whole day) with that potential author, important vendor or business partner.
After 30 years in my career, I can honestly say that this rule is infallible.
Because I travel to teach, and I’ve worked with at least 100 authors all over the world, I get to have a meals with lots of people. During a two- or three-hour meal, I don’t care what we talk about. It could be about woodworking. It could be about stock car racing. Or your IBS. But by the end of the meal, I always know if I want to do business with you or not.
A meal serves up hundreds of little pieces of evidence about whether we will be compatible. How do you treat the server when things go even a tiny bit wrong? How do you approach food (as calories or as an adventure)? Do you order for the whole table? Do you share? Do you interrupt or talk over other people at dinner? Do you listen? How do you handle the bill at the end of the meal?
I could list dozens and dozens of other “tells” we all make during meals.
Yes, there are some cultural differences in how people eat. But basically, a good meal puts on display our arrogance, the way we view social structures and the concept of basic decency.1
I feel so strongly about this idea that now I won’t sign a publishing contract with an author if we haven’t eaten at least one meal together.2
To be honest, we have a handful of authors that I haven’t met in person or eaten a meal with; we signed those contracts before I decided on this rule. We got lucky on a few of them (such as Monroe Robinson, Drew Langsner3 and Richard Jones).
Other authors that I haven’t shared a meal with are my biggest headaches.4 In those cases where I failed, I attempted to do due diligence (huh-huh, I said “doo doo”) with phone calls and protracted email exchanges. But these turned out to be not enough. I now insist that I need to sit with a person, look them in the eye and break bread.
If this sounds like I’m judging others, you are exactly right. I am judging whether I can work with them. And they should judge whether they can work with me.
I promise that this isn’t about politics or a particular worldview. If I graphed our authors’ politics on a chart, one end has people who spend their royalties on ammunition for the coming dark times. The other end has people who work to melt down all the guns in the world.
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