‘They think the goal is to have the book, but no, the goal is to become the person it takes to write your book.’
Dan Kieran is a publishing legend: as a co-founder of Unbound he revolutionized the industry by empowering authors and readers. He learned a lot about himself and about setting up a business along the way, and he brought all that together in Do Start, winner of the Startup Book of the Year at the Business Book Awards.
But he also firmly believes that writing isn’t just, or even primarily, about the final product; it’s the process itself, the way you understand and articulate your journey, both professionally and personally. Which is why turning to AI to generate your writing outputs for you is such a dangerous, self-defeating habit for anyone who cares about ideas.
Or as Dan puts it: ‘Why would anyone want to read something that you couldn’t be bothered to write?’
Dan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-kieran-b49a3329/
Alison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-alison-jones/
The 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge: http://proposalchallenge.com/
Write Strong writing workshop at Gladestone’s Library: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/write-strong-writing-workshop-tickets-1052312483967
The Extraordinary Business Book Club on Substack: https://extraordinarybusinessbooks.substack.com/
The Extraordinary Business Book Club on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1447064765612358/
Alison Jones: I’m here today with Dan Kieran, who is co founder of Unbound, the award winning publishing platform that he led as CEO for over 11 years, taking the business from an idea on a piece of paper to a profitable global company, and he stepped down in March 2022. He remains on the board as a non executive director, and he now teaches on the Publishing MA at UCL.
He’s the author and editor of 14 books, including the best selling Crap Towns, The Idle Traveller, and The Surfboard. And his latest is Do Start, which won the Start Up Scale Up Book of the Year at the Business Awards 2024.
So first of all, welcome, Dan.
Dan Kieran: Oh, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Alison Jones: Great to have you here. And secondly, congratulations. Have you stopped grinning yet?
Dan Kieran: Well, thank you so much. Yes, I was completely thrilled and unexpected. I didn’t imagine I would win. So no, I felt very special that night. It was brilliant.
Alison Jones: It was a good night, wasn’t it? Just talk us through your reaction when they called your name.
Dan Kieran: Well, it was brilliant because I mean, without sounding conceited, Unbound has won quite a lot of awards and I never went to get any of them. It was as a sort of leadership principle. I always got the people that actually did the work to go and get awards when we won them. So I never actually picked one up.
So yes, I had that lovely moment of looking shocked with my wife and then getting up and walking to the stage. No, it was… hey, I’m unabashedly a fan of it. It was wonderful, yes. We had a great, and it was a brilliant night. I met brilliant authors.
And I love so much that it is open to all authors. I think that’s such a powerful thing to be doing. Because especially in the world of entrepreneurship it’s all about having done it. I think that the quality is so high. I mean, I’ve read the other books in my category and yes, these are serious people who’ve done serious things. So that made it even more pleasing to come out on top when the quality was so high.
Alison Jones: A terrific setup really, isn’t it? Just that sort of sense that these are books that are really useful for business leaders, which is the real emphasis of the awards. You’re unlike most of the authors who will have won, as you just alluded to. You’ve seen a lot of books through, haven’t you?
Was it odd to be, you’re a sort of, I don’t know, poacher turned gamekeeper or the way around? I don’t know. What’s it like on the other side?
Dan Kieran: It’s a strange thing, yes, completely, not deliberately, but no, you’re quite right. I mean, I’ve done all kinds of books, been published by most of the big publishers. And of course running Unbound was a real adventure. I mean, I think being an author running a publishing company was really interesting because the challenges of the industry as such. That looking at it through an author’s lens gave you a huge amount of insight, but also horror because it’s so hard.
And once you’re looking at it from every angle, it becomes very difficult to deliver for everybody involved. So, but, I mean, I left because I, you know, too many people said to me, Oh, we’ve just got one of your books and they didn’t mean one of my books. They meant one of Unbound’s books. And after 12 years, that got too frustrating. And I wanted to go back to writing my own. But obviously I’m hugely proud of Unbound and what it’s achieved and, you know, what it is continuing to achieve since I’ve gone.
Alison Jones: And I’m a huge fan of anything that disrupts the business models of publishing because traditional publishing is a very problematic business proposition, isn’t it? So it’s really exciting, and that sense that the author is a much more active participant in the process. I guess, do you know what, for people who are going, what the hell are you talking about?
Can you just give us the quick sort of 30 second introduction to Unbound?
Dan Kieran: Yes, no, of course. It’s a great idea. So yes, essentially we started it like 12, 13 years ago, maybe 14 years ago now, but Twitter had just started. So authors were just beginning to capture their own audiences through social media. And publishers, as you have said, they’re like famous for, they change just enough to ensure they don’t have to change at all. They hadn’t really taken the opportunities of the internet and I was quite, felt quite critical of that because it felt to me like they had basically given Amazon their audience. And I felt like as custodians of an industry, it was their role to safeguard that connection with the readers themselves.
And obviously they do it through book shops who do brilliant things to, you know, to progress authors’ careers and to support publishers, but it just felt like they dropped the ball. So, and Kickstarter was also a year old and we just had this idea that if we could crowdfund really interesting ideas, then we would also be harnessing the power of readers because, you know, publishers are obviously brilliant and talented in different ways, but they don’t sell books to readers.
They sell them to shops.
Alison Jones: Booksellers, yes.
Dan Kieran: What we wanted to do was, well, we could use this new thing called the internet to bring authors and readers together and then readers could decide what they wanted to read. And we curated, and still do, very heavily what goes on the site. It’s absolutely not open. But it was just about saying, you know, let’s ask the audiences now what they want, because, as you will know, publishers use historic sales data to choose what books they’re going to publish in the future. So they’re basically driving by looking in the rearview mirror.
And the beauty of crowdfunding is that if there’s something exciting now, you can harness the interest now, you can monetize it now, and then you can publish the book subsequently. So that…
Alison Jones: … de risking the project.
And it’s also, it unleashes a lot of creativity in the authors. I remember listening to, well, I used to lecture up at Oxford Brookes with Scott Pack, who told me some great stories about, you know, some of the things that authors would do as their rewards because, you know, yes, you can get a copy of the book, but it doesn’t need to stop there.
I think my favorite was the sweary poet who would come on a train journey with you with a pack of lager and sort of do a train journey and sort of just blether to you. It wasn’t Brian Bilston, was it? Who was it?
Dan Kieran: It could have been. Well, again, that was a real insight that we discovered, which was that people, and just publishing is fascinating. They spend this money on this intellectual property and then they sell it in the cheapest possible price point. So what we found very quickly with Unbound is that some readers wanted to spend a thousand pounds with an author, with their favorite author, and the existing publishing business model turned that thousand pounds into £7.99 because the only thing they were selling then was a discounted paperback, or £9.99, the price has gone up.
And that just felt like an insane waste, especially at a time when authors earnings were collapsing. So yes, we felt like if we can monetize the whole range of price points and, you know, be a bit more creative and crowdfunding only works if the creative person in charge of the project is completely committed to it.
So exactly, exactly
Alison Jones: It’s not an easy option, is it?
Dan Kieran: Yes, authors would come up with rewards that were completely unique. I mean, but also incredible, like I remember for the Alan Garner book we did, he gave guided tours of some of the places that his books were set in, in Alderley Edge. And we actually had emails from people saying that is literally the best thing that’s ever happened to me in my life, spending the day with my favorite author going to some of these places.
So we sort of, and everybody knows publishing and books have that impact on readers. But there was just no way of, not monetizing it specifically, but there was just no way of feeding that interest and that fascination. And obviously you see it in literary festivals. But yes, publishing just felt a bit like it should be trying harder.
And talk to agents and they’re tearing their hair out. They’re desperate to find new ways of helping their authors make more money. But also to, you know, to just sort of slightly go beyond the book, I think.
Alison Jones: Yes.
Dan Kieran: And, you know, so we didn’t fix publishing by any means, but the other thing we found was that if you were an author that didn’t see yourself reflected in the culture around you, either because of ethnicity or sexual orientation or because you were into video games or into a subculture that wasn’t reflected, you felt, fairly in the world around you, we just had masses of success with those kind of projects because we were attracting authors who didn’t see themselves in the traditional publishing model.
And, you know, I like to think we’ve had an impact in publishing as a result of that, because lots of authors used us to prove there was interest in their particular perspective or experience and have then gone on to have traditional publishing careers. So, yes, I feel like we did good things. But…
Alison Jones: what you did in….
Dan Kieran: difficult to do.
Alison Jones: Yes, it absolutely is. It’s a very difficult industry and it’s a very low margin industry. I think that’s part of the problem is that publishers don’t feel that they’ve got the kind of resources to experiment, which it was a different kind of conversation. And actually, I could talk to you about publishing all day,
Dan Kieran: yes, I know.
Alison Jones: I want to do that but I’m not going to do that. I’m going to ask about your book, but it’s a really obvious segue, isn’t it? Because everything you learned there, everything about spotting opportunities and connecting people and disrupting the industry, all of that, feeds straight into Do Start, but I want to know about the genesis of the book.
Where did that come from? Who sort of said, huh, I know.
Dan Kieran: So, well, I left Unbound to write books and my first thing was, well, I better bloody write some books. And I have been, I was actually, I mean, I’ve been writing a novel for seven years, which I’m very, very nearly close to finishing, which is actually why I left, which I’m very excited about, but I won’t talk about that today.
But basically I left in April. And I knew Miranda who runs the Do Book company because she actually started at a similar time to Unbound. And obviously I went to the Do lectures and it was a completely transformatory experience for me. And I’m a huge fan of David and Claire Hieatt, who run that and loads of other brilliant things that they do.
Alison Jones: We have had Miranda on this podcast, by the way, if anybody wants to know more that. Yes, she’s told us all about that. Such a brilliant, I wish I’d had the thought to phone them up and say, hey, how about doing a series of books
Dan Kieran: Yes, well that’s just Miranda all over. She’s so, she’s so smart and forward thinking and she’s a brilliant publisher. Like, it’s so hard to do what she’s done. Like we should totally acknowledge that. I mean, it’s incredibly difficult. So yes, essentially I did a Do lecture and I saw her there and we hadn’t seen each other for a couple of years.
And she sort of said to me in passing, Oh, once you’ve done a Do lecture, you’re allowed to do a Do book. You know, if you can come up with an idea that I’m interested in type of thing. Because it’s not a, she’s not a pushover.
Alison Jones: by any means.
Dan Kieran: No one who’s done a Do lecture should think they automatically get books. It does not work like that.
But when I finished, I just had this, I had this massive desire to record how I was feeling in that moment because I was still close enough to it for it to feel current. But I also was getting the beginnings of a perspective and seeing it like looking back on it.
And I just sort of messaged her one day and I said, Look, What do you think? And she messaged me straight back and said, well, are loads of titles I haven’t done that I want to do. And one of them is called Do Start. Why don’t you write about starting a business? And so, and it was amazing because the brief is incredible.
You get a framework, which is like, it has to be this kind of length. You have to write it for one person. You know, you’ve got to imagine you’re talking to one person, which is why they’re so approachable and I think accessible and, you know, she was just like, you know, make it, cover everything you wish you’d known.
And, the real bonus of it was in the conversations I had with her, as I said, I don’t want to write a practical book, that’s specifically practical. So there are loads of books about spreadsheets and how to do…
Alison Jones: Yes, yes. How to register your business. And…
Dan Kieran: Yes. There’s all that kind of stuff, which are great. But I’d never read a business book that talks about how it felt. And because I’m a writer who became an entrepreneur, I obviously come to entrepreneurship with this kind of way of trying to articulate an experience. So it was almost like gonzo journalism, you know, like I’d spent 12 years doing this thing and I’d really lived it to the extraordinary extent.
And then I got to write about it, which was also like incredibly thrilling. Because that’s the thing that really gets me fired up. So I wrote it quite quickly in about three months. And I just wanted to make it incredibly useful and I wanted an entrepreneur to read it and feel like I knew how they felt.
Alison Jones: oh, I felt seen reading it. It was…
Dan Kieran: I hear that so much and it is literally because I’m saying, I was terrified a lot of the time. This is how I coped with my fear. Or I felt really exposed in these situations because the problem with business books generally is that they are all, they’re all people trying to tell you how great they were, like generally, they’re just showing off because they’re seeming a bit insecure and they want you to think they’re brilliant.
And I’ve, to some extent, mine is like that too, right? Because I think that’s a kind of aspect of the genre, but I like…
Alison Jones: We want to read about winners, don’t we? We want to read your lessons, but we want you to come out on top because otherwise, what have you got to teach us? Yes.
Dan Kieran: If you haven’t had some kind of success, then what can you share? So there is a bit of that in my book, but it was mainly about, okay, I’m going to hold your hand and be with you as you go through all these different stages. And so that was the intent.
And so when I finished it and Miranda read it, she gave me some excellent feedback and we fiddled around with it a little bit. But yes, that was my goal really to have a guide alongside you that’s saying, You feel terrible today because this has happened and it’s really doing your head in, but this is why you shouldn’t panic and these are some things you can do.
And that was really my journey of the business really. It was how to kind of….
…how to handle the pressure of what was happening because so much, it was out of your control.
Alison Jones: And I mean, you say it’s not practical, but your tip about running as a sort of business strategy, I am here for that.
Dan Kieran: Yes, well, absolutely. Well, I mean, there was that side of it. It was like, how do you become resilient? Which is the number one attribute you need to have as an entrepreneur. And so it took me a long time to figure out what to do to build that resilience. And yes, giving up booze, running, you know, doing tons of therapy, all this kind of stuff I had not looked at through the lens of my career before. I’d sort of seen them as, Oh, it’d be nice to be able to do that.
Alison Jones: Yes. But haven’t got time because I’m working.
Dan Kieran: Yes, well, the more I worked on myself, the more I delivered for work. And the happier I felt in my own skin. So I started to see my work as the kind of stage upon which I was evolving as an individual.
And that is what makes you a great leader because your staff see you evolving yourself.
So, and it also means that if everything goes wrong and it’s a disaster, you still have an exit because you have evolved and become a different person and stronger and more resilient as a result of the experience.
And that’s what my book is trying to help you figure out, that that’s the path you need to be taking while you’re running your business, because you’d be way more likely to succeed.
Alison Jones: And you’ll be a lot happier and alive when you come out of it, yes. No, it’s a really empowering message.
You are a writer, as you say. And most. writers of business books aren’t, that’s not their kind of primary profession, but you’ve written an awful lot of different types of things. Obviously you know, your novel, but you’ve got this and you’ve done other sort of edited collections and so on.
What role, I guess, does writing play in your life? I mean, I know it’s your primary occupation, but what does it look like and how do you, why is it so important to you?
Dan Kieran: Oh my god, I’ve dreamed of being asked this question. love it.
So, well, it’s just a way of being, I think. I’m obsessed with this at the moment, that meaning is relational. It’s not in a goal. It’s in the distance between one thing and another. And, like the novel I’ve been writing for so long, the reason it’s amazing is not because of the novel.
I mean, obviously I hope it’ll be successful, but it’s completely changed my life, the nine years I’ve been doing it because I’ve had this creative project that my mind is always going back to.
So the analogy I always use is when you’re driving a car, if you let go of the steering wheel, it will naturally straighten, right? It will just naturally go in a straight line. And if I have no other demands on my brain, and I have time, which is very, not very often at the moment with loads of young children. But if I can let go of the steering wheel of my brain, it just naturally gravitates towards the thing I’m writing. And it’s that attempt to articulate the thing which, you know, we’re all trying to make sense of, which is being human. And I read amazing stuff about neuroscience where the part of your brain that makes decisions has no capacity for language. So, you’re always trying to retrospectively explain the instinctive decisions you make.
So writing is really about talking, same as talking, any form of communication. It’s really about understanding yourself. So becoming a writer and writing a business book, for example, you should see it as a way of trying to explain to yourself what you did and what you’re doing, because you don’t know until you go through the process of trying to verbalize it. And then you start to realize that it’s that process that’s enriching and nourishing and makes you feel amazing.
And yes, you know, you’ll get an end product, but it will really change your life while you’re doing it. And that’s why I love writing and it’s just like a life gift, I think to have it. And it’s why I’m so terrified of AI today, because it sort of suggests you don’t need to go through that beautiful, alchemical, wonderful process to make sense of yourself.
You can just cheat by getting chat GPT to do it for you, which I know it has appropriate applications. And I’m not saying it’s terrible, you know, like entirely, but it takes away that search to to mean what you say and phrase what you mean and feel, and it’s that process that is what makes writing so powerful.
Alison Jones: I’m sort of nodding so vigorously. I’m actually hurting my neck a little bit because I think that it’s so true that a lot of people see writing as a thing that you deliver at the end of the day, this is my bit of writing and here it is, and it’s got a function and particularly in business.
But writing is, it’s an active verb. It’s a thing that you do, it’s a process that you go through. And if you just delegate that to, I mean, every time I go on LinkedIn, it says, would you like AI to write a post? No, I absolutely would not because the process of writing is what I’m after here.
Dan Kieran: Why would anyone want to read something that you couldn’t be bothered to write?
Alison Jones: Right. yes, it’s a great, great way of phrasing it, yes. I think now we’ve got books written by AI, precised by AI, some reviewed by AI. I mean, just what is the actual point? Yes, we’re delegating the wrong things, aren’t we?
Dan Kieran: Yes, yes I just think it’s, you know, it’s like if you take a helicopter to the top of a mountain, you still get the view, but you don’t, if you climb it or walk it, you’re living, right? And it changes what you see when you get to the top because of the perspective and the struggle that makes it look different.
Alison Jones: That’s so true. And your emotional connection to it is going to be completely different.
Dan Kieran: And that’s telling you about yourself. Like that’s your journey of figuring out, you know, why we’re all here. And yes, so I know there are, I have some clients who are deaf for whom chatGPT frees them from the tyranny of written language. So it can be amazingly positive, but I just think we’re in that time now where we just need to make sure we’re applying these things appropriately.
And that we’re not losing our sense of who we are in the process of using it. But no, so I mean, yes, everyone should write. It’s about the way it makes you feel, the goosebumps you feel. It’s about that experience of really engaging with yourself. Like it’s so therapeutic. It’s so enlivening.
And I think if you get a book at the end of it, amazing. And there are, you know, there are loads of great things you can think about for actually writing a business book. But that should be where it comes from. It should be from you being curious about what you do and what you did and how you can share that with someone in a way going to resonate.
Alison Jones: Because once you’ve articulated it to yourself, you can share it with other people. I always say that it’s such a powerful self development and professional development project as a business person. I think most people who are in business and who want a book see the value of an actual physical book in the business, but what they don’t always recognize is just how valuable the writing of that book is going to be.
Dan Kieran: Yes, totally. yes. yes. It’s like anything that’s goal driven. They think the goal is to have the book, but no, the goal is to become the person it takes to write your book.
Alison Jones: That’s a great way of phrasing it.
Dan Kieran: That’s why you’re doing it. And yes, you can have a nice thing at the end of it. Hooray! But can’t kind of, if you can’t live it, then it’s just, it will be empty when you get there.
And I think it’s all about meaning. You’ve just got to figure out what you mean and what you want to convey. And that should be hard. It should be a struggle. It should take a lot out of you and these are all good things and will make it better. But yes, no, it’s a brilliant thing to attempt.
Alison Jones: I’m going to force you to pull all that together into your single best bit of advice for somebody who’s just setting off on this journey, specifically around business books. Because there’s all different kinds of writing as we’ve established.
Dan Kieran: Yes, well, the best advice is find your voice. And I think that’s really hard. Because you have to find the way of being yourself on the page. And that’s really difficult if you haven’t written before because you will think there are, you should be like this, or it should sound like this. Or you might, you know, sort of overindulge yourself and sound insincere.
So that is the trick. How do you find your voice? Well, I think you have to be comfortable in your own skin whether you’re writing or not writing. My rule of thumb, Gandhi had this great quote, where happiness is when what you think, do and say are the same thing. And I sort of use that as the handrail.
I always try and make sure that, that I mean it, you know, like I really mean what I’m trying to say. And that I’m not trying to be clever or cute. I’m just going to be myself on the page.
Alison Jones: Or what you think people expect to read. I think that’s a common one,
Dan Kieran: Yes. And writing does have this air about it, that it’s kind of unattainable and difficult.
Alison Jones: Yes, you have do it behind a lecture podium.
Dan Kieran: Yes, exactly. But I think what’s interesting about business books is people want your real life stories. I mean, one really specific bit of advice which I’ve followed is to have three narratives.
So like a narrative of what happened, a narrative of how your industry changed or as a result of what you were doing and then your own journey. And a friend told me that years ago, like 20 years ago. And it’s really helps because it means you’re telling three different stories.
And if you can weave them together, it becomes a rope and it just makes everything stronger. And if you have too much of one, it loses its balance. So stuff like that’s quite helpful.
Just say, I’m telling three stories. What are those three stories? Where do they intersect?
Yes, because often people say, oh, I want to write a memoir, you know, I’ve got this really fascinating story. I’m like, well, unless you’re famous, actually, I hate to tell you this, but nobody cares about your story. Only insofar as it illustrates the bigger story.
Alison Jones: So that’s a really good way of thinking about it.
Yes, and Miranda’s advice about writing for one person, directly to one person.
Dan Kieran: Yes, that was really, yes, because in fact that really helps you find your voice because you know how you are as a person, right? So yes, and the other one is diary forms. If you’re not used to writing, writing something in the form of a diary just feels like you’re not writing a book, you’re writing a diary entry, a series of them.
And that can just be a way, it might not be the end product, but it just gets you writing and you start to get stuff on the page.
And once you’ve got something, even if it’s, you don’t think it’s very good, you can work with it and then you’re off.
Alison Jones: Yes, it’s the tyranny of the blank page, isn’t it? Don’t start by writing the sentence that you think is going to actually start the whole book. Don’t do that. It’s too much pressure.
Dan Kieran: Yes, exactly that. You’ve just got to get moving. Just got to start.
Alison Jones: And I’m going to ask as well for a recommendation. You’re not allowed to recommend Do Start, sorry, but is there a book that you have read I was going to say recent, doesn’t have to be recently, that you’d like to recommend us?
Dan Kieran: There was one I read called Legacy about a guy that managed the All Blacks years and years and years ago. And I really, really enjoyed that. But can I have two?
Alison Jones: Go on.
Dan Kieran: The other one was, the other one was, Turn the Ship Around and it’s about a guy…
Alison Jones: David Marquet yes.
Dan Kieran: And he ran a, he was given the worst performing submarine in the US Navy.
And he took it out on operations and he tore up the rule book. And he did it his own way. And then he got back and they assessed it and he now had the best performing ship in the U S Navy. And rather than fire him, they asked him to write them a new rule book. And there’s just so much about his story that makes you see what it takes and what you have to find in yourself.
Alison Jones: It’s such a great book. I love that.
I don’t know Legacy, so I’m going to seek that out.
Dan Kieran: I can’t think of the guy who wrote it, but it’s, that was amazing for humility. That was all about, you know, like being a leader doesn’t mean everyone has to listen to you. Being a leader means being the one that will catch everything that everybody misses. It’s an act of humility, not status.
And his book on the All Blacks, like the, you know, the highest performing players in that team, Richie McCaw, what were they doing an hour after the game? They were cleaning the changing rooms. That’s the kind of, that’s leadership, man. It’s doing the shittiest job, not the best one.
Alison Jones: Yes.
Dan Kieran: Sorry, I shouldn’t swear.
But so yes, those two books
Alison Jones: There’s the iTunes clean rating gone. Thank you.
Amazing and Dan, if people want to find out more about you, more about the 14 books, particularly Do Start, where should they go?
Dan Kieran: Yes, just my website, dankieran.com or lots of people message me on LinkedIn. Yes, I do all kinds of work with people nowadays helping entrepreneurs and helping writers. So yes, if you’re curious, get in touch.
Alison Jones: Fantastic. Everybody listening to this is curious. That’s a great word.
Wonderful. It’s just been brilliant talking to you and we’ve ranged across some of those topics that are closest to my heart, books and writing and publishing and all that kind of good stuff.
So thank you very much. I’ve enjoyed every minute.
Dan Kieran: It’s been such a pleasure. Thank you for having me on.
