What happens if you don't earn out? Absolutely nothing. You get to keep the advance. Which explains why publishers try to pay advances that are as small as possible and authors try to get as much money as they can up front.
7. THE ACTUAL WRITING OF THE BOOK. Ironically, this can be the easiest part of the process. You're drawing on material you already have on hand and know intimately. The basic thing to keep in mind is that you will be acting as a surrogate reader. Stuff that may seem intuitively obvious to you may be totally new to the reader and will need to be explained completely. It's incumbent upon you to make the complex clear, if not simple.
8. HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE BEFORE YOU SEE THE BOOK ON BOOKSHELVES? Two years: three months to create and sell the proposal, a full year of actually writing the book, and nine months from manuscript delivery to publication. (To explain why the production process lasts nine months would require several pages and lots of expletives.) The fact that it takes so long to get a book published the traditional way is a big reason self-publishing is becoming increasingly popular.
9. SHOULD YOU CONSIDER SELF-PUBLISHING? Once upon a time, self-publishing was considered the last refuge for people who wrote books that (almost) no one wanted to read. That's still true more often than not. A vanity press is probably the only place to go if you want to write about your 28 uneventful years as a municipal clerk in Ohio.
But there can be compelling reasons to publish a book yourself, even if you get a nibble from a traditional publisher. You won't have to wait two years until the product is done: about a month after you get the book to the printer, you can have real, honest-to-goodness books in your hands. You can tailor the book to a narrow audience, if you like; unlike a major publishing house, you don't necessarily have to print and sell tens of thousands of copies. You don't have to share the profits with a publisher. (If you self-publish, you pay for the cost of printing the book -- about $5 or $6 a copy. If you sell it direct for $25, you will make $19 or $20 every time a book goes out the door.) And if your self-published work sells lots of copies, at some point one of the major publishers is going to be interested in talking to you. So being self-published can make a lot of sense.
Hope all this helps.
Paul
For a free copy of the complete memo, send an E-mail message to paulbbrown@aol.com.
My Life as an Author
Seth Godin, 41, founder and former president of Yoyodyne, an Internet direct-marketing company that was acquired by Yahoo. Current book: Survival Is Not Enough.
"I knew it was a long shot, but I wanted to be known as someone who could solve Internet marketing problems.
The advantage of having written a book is I can skip the first six sentences of a conversation. People know what I believe, and we can get right to what they want to talk about.
If you are going to write a book, you have to be willing to say something unpopular. People don't remember now, but when I said flashy graphics was not the way to sell on the Internet, I was hooted off the stage."
Carl Sewell, 58, chairman of Sewell Automotive Cos., a car retailer with 16 franchises and $850 million in 2000 revenues. Currently doing a revised edition of his book, Customers for Life, to be published in the fall of 2002. About 1 million copies of Customers have been sold.
"I wrote the book because Doubleday offered me $100,000 [back in 1989]. How could I turn that down? But writing it helped me clarify our [company's] philosophy not only for our associates but for me, too.
Obviously, the book has exceeded any of my expectations. There has been absolutely no downside to the experience. Oh, about once a month someone will quote the book to us when we screw up, page number and everything, to make their point. But I don't think that's a negative. I want people to hold our feet to the fire.
The book has brought lots of tangible benefits. I get to meet, and learn from, CEOs who never would have spent time with me if not for the book. It has made recruiting easier; some people who would never have thought about working for a car dealership have come aboard because of things we wrote.
Advice? Expect it'll be hard. It's important to stick with it and say exactly what you want to say. I remember being frustrated because it was taking me far more time than I'd expected and was taking me away from running the business -- and I mentioned that to Stanley Marcus [who wrote the afterword]. He told me to get back to work on the book. He said, 'Carl, don't you know this is the most important thing you'll ever do to show people what your company is all about? More people will judge you on the book than anything else.' That got my attention. And he was right."
Bob Rosen, 46, CEO of Healthy Cos. International, a consulting and education firm in Washington, D.C. Author of three books, including Leading People. Working on two more books right now.
"Learning is probably the first of the reasons I write. There is clearly a marketing benefit as well; the books help position me as an expert. Then there are the connections it helps me build. I have interviewed 250 CEOs in 30 countries in the process of writing my three books.
The downsides? The process always takes longer than I think. My friends say my social skills deteriorate during the process. And you are clearly putting yourself on the public stage, the end of the diving board. You need to be comfortable with that.
As for advice: Get yourself a good agent. Carve out the time you are going to need to do that. Only write if you have something to say. And keep control of the process. Marketing is 51% of writing a book. If you rely on your publisher, agent, or editor exclusively, you're going to be disappointed. The world is not going to beat a path to your door."
Copyright © 2002 Paul B. Brown
The Inc Life
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