A best-selling ghostwriter explains the making of business books, and what you don't want to know about it.
From: Inc. Magazine, May 1999 | By: Anonymous Anonymous
| Inc. At 20 Years! Look back at the people and trends that shaped our world, 1979-1999 |
How a business book is made, and what you don't want to know about it
Author's note: Everything you are about to read is true. Only a few names--and an identifying detail or two--have been changed, so that I can continue to keep my children and my ex-spouse in the manner to which they have become accustomed.
PART 1
In which we see how thoughts became branded ideas
"I need a book."
The man on the other end of the phone is a futurist who used to work for Apple, but it really doesn't matter what he does for a living. He (or his representative) could be a consultant, an Inc. 500 CEO , or a business-school professor. They all say the same thing when they call me. "I need a book. I need you to make me a best-selling author."
Welcome to the world spawned by In Search of Excellence. Little did McKinsey consultants Tom Peters and Bob Waterman imagine, when they set out to commercialize their ideas nearly 20 years ago, that--
Before In Search of Excellence, if you came up with an idea, it became part of the business currency. With the exception of Peter Drucker--and perhaps W. Edwards Deming--the creator of the idea remained unknown. Sure, there was always the maverick business professor who did extensive consulting work with corporations--for example, Ted Levitt of the Harvard Business School is a key reason that companies started going global in the 1970s--but for the most part their names were known to only a few. (1)
Peters and Waterman changed all that. They proved that at worst your "silver-bullet solution" (2) could make you a guru (see " When Everyone Was Excellent." ) and at best could lead to a cottage industry.
Want to know how big the branded-idea business is?
Nobody has an exact number, but the value of the branded-idea business must be approaching $10 billion a year, when you factor in the ancillary businesses such as the speeches, videos, seminars, and consulting work that result from having a book published.
That last point is no small one.
The smart "authors" today view their books as loss leaders.
I'm ghosting a book for which a major publisher gave the named author a $250,000 advance. After agent fees and expenses, I am getting the entire advance to create the book, which will be out this fall. Why would "the author" readily give up a quarter of a million dollars (besides the fact that I am such a charmer)? The reason is simple. He figures his consulting business will go up $5 million a year once he has a book to leave behind on sales calls. "Spending" $250,000 to generate $5 million is a 20:1 return. Not all consultants are dumb.
PART 2
In which it's explained how 'writing' gets done
OK, so how does one of these business books get created?
It starts with an idea. A potential author could generate it. ("Hmm, I wonder how the wit and wisdom of Yogi Berra could be applied to management.") But just as frequently the idea comes from an editor ("Can we do Your Inner Angel's Guide to Management?") or an agent ("Susie is doing 75 business/motivational speeches a year, and she's never been on TV. Damn, we've got to get this girl a book").
From there the process is very Hollywood. No, not in the sense that everyone wears Armani, (3) but in the way that movies are developed.
No one but the hopelessly naïve writes a complete screenplay on spec. The pros get paid for pitching a vague idea called a concept (boy meets girl; boy loses girl; boy gets girl back) and paid again for developing that "concept" into a "high concept" or idea (boy meets girl and so forth, in Africa). If the moguls like the high concept, the writer gets paid a third time for morphing the high concept into a detailed outline, that is, a "treatment" (boy [Redford] meets girl [Streep] in Africa and he loses her when...).
In the book business, most often someone--like me--is hired to write a proposal to get the project under way. A proposal is a trilevel marketing document.
On the first level you are trying to persuade the editor that the idea will make a great book, even if The Management Wisdom of Yogi Berra was her idea. You point out why the author is the best person to write it and why the publisher is destined to make lots of money if the book reaches the marketplace.
But the proposal serves two other functions. It is the document the editor will use to seek the approval of the editorial board---individual editors don't have the ability to offer a book contract on their own--and it will also serve as the "battle plan" for the publisher's marketing staff (whose thinking tends to be underwhelming when they're left to their own devices).
In all, proposals run 25 to 45 pages and usually include a detailed table of contents and at least part of a sample chapter. (4)
What do I get for a proposal? About $25,000.
A wanna-be author can take alternative routes to get the publisher's attention. Sometimes authors--or their people--decide they want to do an article for Harvard Business Review instead. (I charge $20,000 to ghost one of those.) Or someone else might try building interest in a book project by doing a high-profile speech (my fee for writing one: $15,000) or maybe a "Manager's Journal" piece in the Wall Street Journal ($7,500 to $10,000). As you can see, an entire industry has sprung up around getting ideas into shape, just so they can be considered as material for books.
There is no guarantee, of course, that any publisher will offer a contract just because the author has followed these steps, but it sure increases the chance of success.
Now I'll let you in on a dirty little secret, and the primary reason that my byline is not on this piece: If you promise to buy 25,000 copies or more--at cost, plus 10% (5)--you will basically have your pick of publishers for your book. (If you don't want to offer a guarantee, whether you get published will depend on the quality of your idea alone.)
Sometimes the books become best-sellers. More often they don't. There are 50,000 to 60,000 books published each year, and about 500 or so--roughly 1%--land on someone's best-seller list. (6)
Writing a book is itself pretty mundane. Either I'll interview the "author" at length or the author will have some person dig up and turn over the material I need. (7) Research done, I can turn out 1,000 to 1,500 good words a day. Since the average book is about 80,000 words, the writing takes about four months.
There is one thing I can count on if I'm doing a book with a CEO. At some point during the process he or she will say, "Do you want to run a publishing company?" The question gets asked every time I tell the "author" that it will take nine months, if we're lucky, from the time we drop off the manuscript to the time the book appears on shelves.
In this day of instantaneous communication, you may find that hard to believe (the CEOs all do), but it's true.
For one thing, even though everyone writes with word-processing programs, the editor actually goes through the manuscript and marks it up with a pencil. Then the whole thing is retyped at the publishing house and sent back to the author, who makes changes in pencil and sends them back for someone to put in electronically. Then the editor goes over it again. Then the writer does. The art department, which designs the cover, and the folks who print the book are this efficient as well. That's why you're lucky if it takes nine months to produce something you can sell. (8)
But eventually the book is done. Sometimes "authors" read it closely, sometimes they don't. 9
PART 3
The moral of our story
So what does all this mean? You already knew that business books ain't literature. You also knew that a lot of stuff that's published probably shouldn't be. "Buyer beware" extends to more than purchasing a used car.
But I look at the way I make my living from a slightly different perspective.
The true marketplace my CEO clients and you (and your company) are competing in--whether you offer a product or a service--is the marketplace of ideas. And you're not going to win in this marketplace unless you get heard. The odds are, you don't need a book. (While I'd love the work, I now charge a minimum of $200,000, plus a hefty percentage of sales.) But you do need a way to get your message across.
A lot of things have changed in the past two decades, but that's not one of them.
Editor's note: Anonymous has ghostwritten more than a dozen business books and has also had real jobs at notable national publications. He says that ghosting pays better.
Footnotes
1. Today, however, it would be easier to count the business professors who aren't doing consulting than those who are--and, not surprisingly, a lot of them want to write nonacademic books and go off to ride the lecture circuit. About half the phone calls I receive nowadays are from business-school professors.
2. This term refers to what the Lone Ranger used to kill the bad guys. It describes any idea touted as a business cure-all. Silver-bullet books such as Theory Z and Reengineering the Corporation were all the rage during the 1980s and early 1990s. I ghosted three silver-bullet books, each of which contradicted the other two. All three were minor best-sellers.
3. Lord knows, I'm no fashion plate. I wrote this while wearing a battered Naval Academy sweatshirt and a pair of jeans that may at one time have been blue. I do, however, know where the local Armani store is. My 16-year-old son shops there.
4. Notice that at no point in the process did I mention what the purported author of the proposal (and presumably of the book) does. That's because not only do the authors not write proposals, but frequently they don't even read them until the publisher calls them to say, "Love your proposal, let's do a deal."
5. "Cost" is about $4 to $5 a book. Here's a cram course in publishing economics (to forestall the flood of letters, I'll concede up front that these are rough figures): Let's say a hardcover book retails for $25. The publisher wholesales the book for about $12.50 to bookstores and the Amazon.coms of the world. Out of the $12.50 that is now in the publisher's pocket, contractually the author gets about 15% of the cover price--or $3.75 a copy in royalties. That reduces the publisher's take to $8.75. Figure $4.50 for printing, $1 for general overhead, and maybe 50¢ for marketing support. You're left with a gross profit of about $2.75 a book. Need another reason why publishers love authors whose books sell a lot of copies?
6. However, when something hits, there is serious money to be made from book sales alone. A real example: I ghosted a book for Publisher A that came out about a decade ago and sold 200,000 copies in hardcover at $20. Profits to publisher: about $500,000. (First-run economics were a little different back then.) Then the paperback rights were sold to Publisher B--a common practice--for $100,000. Under the terms of the contract, the author and Publisher A split the paperback sale as well as all future paperback royalties--so Publisher A was now up $550,000 in profits. And here's where it got interesting. Publisher A kept the book in hardcover a bit longer and sold another 100,000 copies, periodically raising the price along the way. Profits on those additional copies alone: about $400,000, since there were no marketing costs and overhead had long since been accounted for. Total profits on the book in hardcover: just shy of $1 million. But remember, Publisher A also got half the paperback royalties, and the book is still selling in paperback. Publisher A's total take so far: about $3 million.
7. I've done two books without once meeting their authors. All our contact took place by phone, fax, and E-mail.
8. If the publishing house moves any faster--to get a book into stores six months after the manuscript is delivered is considered lightning speed by publishers--they call it "crashing" the manuscript.
9. As one CEO--who with my help made the best-seller list a couple of years ago--told me: "I think of you as a plumber. Maybe the world's best plumber, but a plumber nonetheless. And I think of this book thing like a clogged drain. You're hired to make the problem go away. Once you do, I'll take a look." He really said that. And no, there was no malice intended. The man was known in the press for his "candor." And he paid well.