Dave Rosenbaum's blog

Historically, writers and editors have been comic figures, ye olde ink-stained wretches, necessary evils, people so lacking in life skills that they're reduced to trying to earn a living by putting words together, something anyone, even a child (and certain birds) can do. Is it any wonder that they've always been poorly regarded and treated contemptuously? So why should consultancies and businesses value writers and editors and treat them well?

I was informed by a client this morning that my compensation for writing for their website would be cut by more than 50 percent.

I was told not to take this personally; all the writers the client employed were taking the same cut and they were taking it happily.

After a few email exchanges, I told the client that I couldn't do it and that, as they say, was that.

But this isn't about me. This is about how writing is valued.

I was at MIT the other day listening to the CEO of a small technology company discussing his company's security product when a member of the audience asked him about "cloud governance" and I saw the CEO's head explode.

Once upon a time I had a boss who would always end his memos announcing some new Draconian policy with the phrase: "Thank you for your mandatory cooperation."

Of course, this became an oft-repeated office joke. Clearly, if something is "mandatory," then "cooperation" loses its meaning as, indeed, does "Thank you." His pet phrase made him look ridiculous and, in the immortal words of Jack Woltz, the movie mogul in The Godfather, "A man in my position can't afford to be made to look ridiculous." (And look what happened to Woltz. He ended up with a horse's severed head in his bed. I don't think my old boss got that treatment, but his tenure was relatively brief.)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that corporate writing--from white papers to one-sheets and everything in between--stinks. Say "white paper" to 99 out of 100 executives and first you'll hear a snicker, and then something along the lines of "I never read that [insert expletive]."

Why is this the case?

After all, most of this writing is done by professionals. Most of these professionals are pretty good. And the people who employ these professional writers are not, for the most part, stupid. From time to time the ideas in these articles are interesting, even novel and useful. So why is the end product so reliably lousy?

It's lovely to be able to refer to "my agent." Just saying "my agent" gives you the feeling that you're special, that you've got an edge, that you're not alone in the world.  I've always enjoyed it immensely.  It's sort of like referring to "my guardian angel," only your agent is flesh and blood and, you hope, bustling from publisher to publisher trying to sell your book proposal and make you as much money as he or she can.

The agent most people are familiar with is Entourage's Ari Gold (Jeremy Piven), the vulgar, hyper, fast-talking shark whose character is widely believed to be based on Ari Emanuel, founder of the Endeavor Talent agency (which last year took over the famous and venerable William Morris agency) and the brother of President Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, also reputed to be a vulgar, hyper, fast-talking shark. 

Let's say an editor likes your proposal. She's prepared to try to convince her boss that this is a project worth investing in to the tune of X dollars--your advance.

 (Your advance, by the way, is probably the only money you'll ever see so you'll want to maximize whatever you can get. Forget royalties. Royalties are paid only after the publisher recoups all its expenses--your advance, printing and distribution and promotional costs, etc.--and it's the publisher doing the accounting, not you. So unless you hit the best-seller list, or "Oprah," or your book becomes a text ordered by schools and universities, royalties are something people like Tom Clancy and Kitty Kelly get, not you. And as for selling movie and televison rights . . . well, you can dream, can't you?)

It’s no secret that the book publishing business is in big trouble. Book sales only grew 1.6 percent from 2002 to 2008, according to Ken Auletta in “Publish or Perish” in the April 26 New Yorker.

That’s not good. In fact, it stinks.

For writers, that means, among other things, that advances will be lower, press runs will be smaller, and getting published will be harder.

So you’ve got to help.

The most important thing to know about a book proposal is that it's not actually a proposal and it doesn't really have much to do with books.

In the publishing world, the term "book proposal" is simply a traditional nom d'art. What a book proposal really is is a business plan one creates to entice an investor (the publisher) to go into partnership with you to produce a product, which just happens to be a book.

How do you help the publisher make that decision? How do you convince it that there will be a nice return on investment?

Well, why shouldn't you write a book? Thousands do. According to Bowker (a publishing industry consultancy) there were close to 9,000 new titles published in 2008 in the business sector alone.

So you may be asking yourself, to paraphrase the Cowardly Lion in "The Wizard of Oz," "Whatta those authors got that I ain't got?" After all, you're smart. You have lots of innovative ideas about this and that. You write well. (Don't your colleagues regularly praise your emails?) And aren't people always telling you, "Brad (or Cheryl, as the case may be), you should write a book." Which is easy to say. But what does it really take?