101: Writing a Business Book…Why and How? Part 2
In our series on writing a business book, let’s pick up where we left off last week. I wrote that there are two ways to get your book into print: sell it to a publisher or self-publish. This week, let’s explore finding a publisher. A publisher will pay you an advance against the book’s earnings, edit and print it and distribute your work to bookstores and online booksellers.
In 2002, after two decades of conducting media training workshops, I decided to write a book that expanded on what I taught. I wanted to create a comprehensive take-away for clients that went beyond the 20- to 22-page customized workbook I create for every media training session. Also, I felt a book would validate my expertise to prospective clients and yield more business. Coincidentally, I hoped to create a modest revenue stream. Well, make that a revenue trickle because I knew publishing was growing every more parsimonious. For example, a how-to book on energy saving I co-wrote in the 1970s earned a then-generous $15,000 advance. McGraw-Hill, the nation’s largest business book publisher, bought my proposed media training book in 2003 for a $10,000 advance. Today, just seven years later, that would be considered a generous advance. An agent I interviewed said $5,000 is a typical business book advance now.
Out of the advance, your agent collects a 15 percent commission, up in recent years from the traditional ten percent. And you will need an agent because many publishers no longer accept unsolicited proposals directly from an author. Publishers used to have armies of recent college graduate readers poring through unsolicited material. Today they save money by outsourcing that job agents.)
One way to find an agent is through the web site www.publishersmarketplace.com
There are also some useful books: “2010 Guide to Literary Agents” by Chuck Sambuchino, “Jeff Herman’s Guide to Book Publishers, Editors and Literary Agents 2010” (both $20 on Amazon.com), and “Literary Marketplace, 2010” (this one costs $300 so you might want to look for it in the library). Securing an agent is tough; agents are inundated with proposals and manuscripts. The agent I interviewed requested anonymity because he doesn’t want to receive any more than the 30 proposals he receives every day.
Don’t write your whole book and then go hunting for an agent. It’s better to prepare a proposal; agents and publishers both prefer this. Your proposal should be an essay of up to eight pages explaining the premise of the book, your credentials, a survey of competing books now on the market, and a detailed chapter-by-chapter outline. Also the proposal should have one or two sample chapters; agent and publisher need to know you have the necessary writing skills. Finally describe your promotional campaign for the book: the publicist you intend to hire, the speeches you intend to make, the media you intend to do and the book signings you are going to line up.
Book promotion used to be the publisher’s job, but they’ve outsourced this job, too — to authors. A publisher is much more disposed to buy a book from an author who pledges to hire a competent book publicist than from an author who has no promotional ideas or budget. Publishers and agents can recommend the right publicist, just be aware that a publicist will cost $1,500 to $2,500 a month.
So let’s do the math: Your advance is $5,000. Subtract the agent’s commission of $750 and two months of a publicist at $1,500/month. That leaves you with $1,250. You can’t count on future book sales to change the picture very much. Many books don’t “clear” their advance — that is, they never sell enough copies for the author to earn any royalties over and above the initial advance.
But even with only $1,200, you’re still ahead and you do have a book to drive business to your company or to burnish your image. In effect, the publisher is financing your business promotion effort. Up to a point. It all depends on how many books you’re going to need. In my case I used close to 1,000 over the first two and a half years after publication — some for sales promotion, others as take-aways to participants in training workshops.
Publishers don’t give you an unlimited supply of your own book — you have to buy copies after the first 25 or 50. In my case, McGraw-Hill had a $16.95 price on my media training book and sold me copies at the discounted price of $8.00. Here is how the numbers worked out for me: Advance: $10,000, agent’s commission: $1,500, publicist:$2,000, books purchased: $8,000. I was, in theory, $1,000 in the red. In practice this wasn’t the case because the book yielded new clients and I incorporated the $8.00 book price into my media training fees.
If you have never written a book before, if you don’t really have the time to write one or if you doubt that you have the necessary skills, you may want or need a collaborator (i.e. a ghost writer). Your agent can find one for you. How much will this cost? It varies. Some collaborators take an up-front fee. Some work on a percentage of the advance, some on a percentage of all earnings. In no case should the collaborator receive more than a 50/50 split.
For my media training book, I wrote the proposal and the book myself. I called it “How to Master the Media,” but McGraw-Hill insisted that I re-title it, “How to Make the Most of Every Media Appearance” because they thought my title was too confrontational (It was, by design!). In vain I pointed out that it was impossible to work their mouthful of a title into interviews, while “How to Master the Media” was practically a soundbite in and of itself.
I had three problems with the publisher: the title, which I felt was wimpy, the inability to do running revisions (new behavioral science validated some of my training techniques and I wanted to insert that validation into the book), and the cost of buying my own book. If the book had been selling 500 to 1,000 copies a month in bookstores and on Amazon.com, I would not have been troubled by any of this. But, like most business books, my store, online and e-book sales were modest, so I researched self-publishing. When I discovered that each copy would cost me significantly less than $4.00 and that “print on demand,” meant I could make changes whenever I wanted, I decided to get the rights back from McGraw-Hill, revise the book, put its original title back on it, and self-publish. Next time I’ll write about the self-publishing option.
101: Writing a Business Book…Why and How?
If you are a business person with a lot of experience, fresh ideas and a desire to share your knowledge you may be thinking about writing a book. Over the next few weeks, I’ll address creating and publishing a business book. To put these entries together, I’m relying on my own experiences — as the author or co-author of five published books — and on interviews with an agent, two other authors and an executive at a self-publishing printing house. In addition, I’ve done some online and bookstore research.
Why would a business person with a heavy schedule consider writing a book? A book can burnish credentials, drive business to a company and generate a revenue stream. I put the revenue stream last because proceeds from most book sales are pretty modest these days.
A visit to my local Barnes & Noble gave some indication why a business author’s earnings may be modest; there’s a lot of competition. The B&N I visited stocked nearly 4,000 separate business titles. Speaking of competition, a random survey indicated that your biggest competitors may be Suze Orman and Warren Buffett. Ms. Orman had more titles on the shelves than anyone else I could find — I counted eight of them — and books about Mr. Buffett were equally numerous.
While B&N divided its 4,000 titles into 13 separate categories, I found the business books actually fell into three basic areas:
Reportage about business, business trends and the economy:
In this category are the many volumes about the run-up to the current recession, such as Michael Lewis’ “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine.” “Sixty to Zero,” a chronicle of the fall of General Motors, was another example of this sort of journalistic business book. I am assuming that readers of this essay are not full-time reporter/researchers so unless you are an insider in a news-making company, you’re unlikely to be writing one of these volumes.
Profiles of businessmen (either biographies or autobiographies) and histories of individual companies:
In this category I found books by outsiders, such as Ken Auletta’s “Googled, The End of the World as We Know It,” and books by insiders, such as “Delivering Happiness” by Henry Hsich, CEO of online shoe retailer Zappos, and “Only the Paranoid Survive,” by Intel’s Andy Grove. An unexpected CEO book was “The Ride of a Lifetime: Doing Business the Orange County Choppers Way,” by OC Choppers founder Paul Teutul, the star of TLC’s hit show, American Chopper. Without question Teutul is the business author with the biggest biceps and most tattoos. While you may lack the biceps and ink, perhaps you have a corporate story sufficiently interesting to warrant attempting such a book.
How to succeed in business:
This is a vast category and runs a long gamut including marketing, advertising, sales promotion, investing, employee motivation, accounting, entrepreneurship, e-commerce and personal finance. In this category we find the ubiquitous and competing “…. For Dummies” and “Complete Idiot’s Guide to…..” series. Other titles I saw included “Facebook Marketing” (I found no fewer than three titles about how to market on Facebook), “Twitter Marketing” (no, the book is not 140 characters long), and “Ignore Everybody & 39 Other Keys to Creativity.” My favorite in this section is rapper 50 Cent’s offering: “The 50th Law” which features his business wisdom from the mean streets including “Hood Economics” and “Hustler King.” Even though they lack Mr. Cent’s exciting professional background — he is a former drug dealer who was shot nine times in an assassination attempt — most business people write books in the how-to category.
My recommendation is to write about what you know first-hand, because it can take months to research what you don’t know first-hand. A trust attorney I met wrote a book that attempted to explain trusts to non-lawyers. I know a networking guru who wrote a book on networking. I attended a seminar by an author who wrote a book on creating seminars. And a friend who has a marketing firm wrote a book of successful marketing case histories, drawing lessons other businesses can apply. After two decades of media training, I have written two books on how to handle yourself in media encounters.
Once you’ve settled on your subject, you need to assure yourself you have enough material to fill a book. Not all ideas are book-worthy; sometimes you can capsulize what you need to communicate in a brochure or magazine article-length piece. Assess if there’s enough material by creating a full outline of your book. There is no right or wrong way to construct an outline. Personally, I start with a simple list, then expand the list into an outline and then write a paragraph for each outline point. If I feel the urge to write more than a single paragraph for each point, I know I likely have enough material to fill a volume.
How long are business books? Well, the reportage, business profiles and biographies can range upward of 500 pages. But how-to books are always shorter; typically running under 275 pages. How many words is that? It depends on the size of the type and the layout of the book. Some of the how-to’s have charts and graphs and open layouts that add many pages. My current book, “How to Master the Media” is a conventional-sized paperback, runs 235 pages, has a few illustrations (screen grabs of web pages) and stylistic flourishes (insert boxes with highlighted material), is printed in 11 point type and contains 85,000 words. So figure if you want to write a 200 page book you will need a 70,000 to 75,000-word manuscript.
If you have the time and the inclination to write a book you are now faced with a critical decision: find a publisher or self-publish. I’ve done both. To find a publisher, you will have to sell your book idea three times: to an agent, to a publisher and to the public. In the self-publishing scenario, you have to sell it only once: to the public. (Unless you’re planning on giving the book away as a promotional vehicle, as the trust attorney did. In that case no sales are involved.) If you want to go the publisher route, don’t write the book; write only an outline. As a rule publishers buy business books based on outlines not full manuscripts. If you decide to self-publish, plough ahead and write the whole book, using Microsoft Word. Publishers and printers require electronic submission and prefer Word. The software has tools you’ll find very useful like word counts, grammar checks, change tracking and comprehension level guides. If you’re like me and World’s auto-formatting drives you crazy, you can turn those features off while you write. (And if you figure out how to do it, please let me know, I’ve never had success shutting down all of them.)
Next time I’ll address selling your book idea to a publisher.
Top Ten Questions to ask Yourself While Editing Your Own Writing
Filed Under: Top Ten Lists
Tags: Editing, Top Ten List, Writing
Entrepreneurs wear many hats so they often write and edit everything of their own, from proposals to press releases. Below are the top ten questions I ask myself when I edit and proofread my own work.
Editing Checklist
Approximately how many errors do I expect to find per page? (Knowing the density of errors common to the writer, even when you are the writer makes you a more successful editor.)
Have I checked numbers, capitalization, names of people and organizations, hyphens, punctuation, often-confused-words, and difficult-to-spell words?
Have I reworked the sentences in the text during which I hesitated or stumbled when I read the piece aloud?
Is there any block of text that I can cut without sacrificing meaning? On the sentence level, are there words I can cut that do not add meaning?
Are there blocks of text or sentences that would benefit from further explanation or clarification? If so, consider writing one additional sentence.
Are there words I want to reconsider because they lack precision, or because they are either too formal or too informal?
What sentence most clearly and succinctly captures the core of my message? Knowing where the heart of your meaning appears allows you to consider its placement.
Which sentence in this piece would make the best beginning? The best closing?
Are there any long sentences that would read better as two?
Are there any ideas expressed in several sentences that could be delivered in just one?
