Writers, Readers, Editors and … Trust

Every book is a journey. It’s a conjunction of influences, ideas and knowledge. When the idea for it is first aired a writer is prepared to give up ownership of it. First it gets picked at and reshaped by editors, then it is looked at and changed by marketers and finally it is read and owned by readers.

You notice in this long chain of events that the writer who actually thinks up and creates the book in the first place is never mentioned. Nor is he taken into account in the end, though his role in making it happen is critical. There is a good reason for that. Writers are often thought to be creators and in a way that’s true we take a bunch of pages or, more often than not, a certain amount of disk space, that’s blank and we fill it with content.

We make something appear where nothing existed before. That’s the magical part. But before the magic even happens a whole lot of other things must happen. The idea, obviously, but also we, as writers do actually need the validation of an editor who is not a writer. An independent, corroborating our belief that there is a market, that this book and the effort involved in birthing it, will actually be useful.

And though readers may seem a bit of an afterthought, tacked into the sequence of events right at the end because the ultimate form of validation is, indeed, the willingness of someone to fork up some money and buy a book, they really feature throughout the process.

The writer is thinking of readers when he first comes up with the idea. The editors are actually thinking of readers when they say “I think there is a market, here”. And readers themselves are, these days, an integral part of the writer’s journey as the book itself gets written.

Funnily enough, trust plays a key role in the entire process. Each of us trusts in the benevolence of everyone involved. When an editor rejects an idea about a book by saying they do not think there is a market for it, the author has to trust that what they are saying and what they want is the same thing as the author: a book that will resonate with its audience and actually help them in some way.

When editors buy a book based on an outline, a few phonecalls and a handshake they too place trust in the author’s ability to deliver a final product of sufficiently high quality that will do as expected.

Without that sense of trust throughout, none of this would happen. Authors would try to second-guess and argue with editors all the time. Editors would get so stifling in their double-checking that the book is being written for an author to be unable to write and, should anything publishable be produced under these conditions, the reading public would wonder just what is the hidden agenda behind the publication of the book? Who is secretly trying to manipulate them and thought-control them?

This trust in other people’s benevolence and an overall benevolent universe is what makes it possible to get anything done, at all. In writing "The Tribe That Discovered Trust" I had to navigate the usual tangle of complicated choices. Which research did I include? What did I leave out? Trust is a quality that’s defined both by our actions and belief system. As such, it is something that makes us very human.

It is that humanity that I somehow needed to capture as I worked on the book. The story that comes in the beginning contains many clues regarding human behavior and motivation. Working your way through it and the workbook afterwards is a necessary part of the realization of what it is exactly that drives us every time we say “I trust you”.

Give then fact that the articulation of a willingness to trust has to acknowledge the existence of its opposite, any “I trust you” moment must be preceded by an inherently untrustworthy situation, otherwise why say it at all?

It is these paradoxes that made the research and writing of the book so intensely rewarding. Trust is something we are only now beginning to look at. Here’s to understanding it well enough to make better use of it.

The Tribe That Discovered Trust: How Trust Is Created Lost and Regained in Commercial Interactions