Late-Night Thoughts on Selling Nonfiction
By Jim Hornfischer
[Speech, Writers League of Texas, March 4, 2001, Austin]
When I consider the fact that I’m standing here as your speaker this morning, I can’t help but feel that some kind of mistake has been made.
After all, the title of this program is “Exploring the Creative in Nonfiction.” And I have to say, all this emphasis on the creative has a dollars-and-cents guy like me feeling a little bit like a barbarian at the gate.
I mean, if the idea is to talk about creative, what on Earth is an agent doing up here?
The topic of my talk is more likely along the lines of, “Exploring the Fiscal in Nonfiction.” Now that has a nice ring to it. (And I think the suggestion of money actually may have woken up a few people in the back row back there.) Money is well and good, but how can it coexist peacefully with creativity at a time when the bestseller list is full of titles by professional wrestlers, right-wing talk show hosts from Fox News Channel, and mediagenic weight-loss gurus?
Does creativity stand a chance against Jesse Ventura, the Atkin’s Diet, and Talking Dirty with the Queen of Clean? Even if it does, what would an agent have to say about it anyway?
After all, there are some things that everybody simply knows.
1. In their pursuit of almighty Mammon, agents trample creativity like mesquite brush under a buffalo stampede.
2. Agents routinely douse water on the creative spark by forcing the unique voices of the wonderful books that crosses their desk into tiny, cramped pigeonholes dictated by Barnes & Noble headquarters in New York.
3. Agents judge writers not by their writing, but by their facility in schmoozing producers who work for Oprah Winfrey, or by how many times they’ve been seen on The Today Show.
Hearing, for instance, that today authors must have a media platform from which to sell books, a synergized, multimedia presence in print, broadcast, and on-line, how far is good old fashioned creative writing going to carry you?
If you have to be Rupert Murdoch’s “mini-me” before a publisher will even look at your work, what’s the use of poring over Strunk and White for hours on end?
Well, those are questions worth exploring. And I have to give you a caveat: when I’m done talking this morning, you’re likely still going to be pondering these questions, because I’m not sure I have answers. But what I do have is this: a way about thinking about the tricky business of selling books that might change the way you think, give you some confidence, and look at things like publishing trends and proposal writing in a slightly different light.
So I want to give you some truth in advertising: Although the title of my talk, “Late Night Thoughts on Selling Nonfiction,” was expressly calculated to suggest something provocative and thoughtful, after the fashion of Lewis Thomas (the great biologist and author of Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony) my title, in fact, means nothing more than this: I wrote this speech last night between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m.
Probably a more appropriate title for this talk would have been something like, “Early Morning Thoughts on Selling Nonfiction While Under the Influence of Caffeine and No-Doz.”
Now a moment ago, I told you a few things that everybody knows about agents and publishing. Though there’s bit of truth to each of them, they’re myths, really.
At first blush, it would seem that we’re not here to talk about writing and creativity at all. We’re here to talk about salesmanship.
But what I hope to show you in this talk today is that the inscrutable art of literary salesmanship involves nothing more than packaging all of the skills of good writing that Lee and all of the panelists here were talking about yesterday.
SALESMANSHIP
Who here likes salesmen? Who here likes selling things to others? Writers tend to be an introverted lot, and writers, more than other people, I think, tend to be uncomforable with the idea of selling, and above all selling themselves.
You may think this is ironic, but I dislike salesmen more than most of you do. I’ve had three calls already this weekend from AT&T and MCI trying to get a piece of my monthly telephone bill.
I’ve developed a whole bag of tricks to thwart their incessant assaults. My favorite one is the consequence of new fatherhood: The phone rings, there’s that two beat pause, then an AT&T rep comes on the line, and asks to speak with J-J-James Hornswoggler?
I hand the phone to my 3-year-old son and tell him grandpa’s on the phone. The conversation lasts about eight seconds, touching on subjects such as the Teletubbies, Superman, and Buzz Lightyear, and before you know it David is wondering why his beloved papa hung up on him.
We’re all tired of sales, I think. While I think most of us still feel sorry for Willie Loman when we read Death of a Salesman, that doesn’t keep us from slamming the door in the face of the Omaha Steaks guy, or hanging up on Dudley Do-Right calling from the Police Benevolent Association.
I have a client, a member of the Writer’s League in fact, who is a wonderfully gifted writer. He doesn’t like salesmen at all. Right outside his door he has posted a little piece of paper called “The Rules.” It has five numbered items on it. They go something like this:
1. We like our religion. Save witnessing for those who need it.
2. Mr. Trump is not at home. Do not ask for money or work. We’d like to help, but we’re busted, too.
3. Right-wing political agitators will be beaten severely about the head and shoulders.
4. Safe passage is granted postal carriers and delivery persons.
5. Sales persons, environmental and consumer activists may be seduced at residents’ discretion. (Bony vegetarians excepted unless really cute.)
This is a writer talking, as you can tell from the economy and angularity of the prose. It’s a shield he’s erected between himself and the commercial world. I think many of us have this aversion to salesmanship.
Gary Lavergne over here, for one, says he would rather be eaten alive by fire ants than have to write a book proposal.
Another client of mine who is a historian, wrote a great proposal for an absolutely startling book about anti-Semitism in the U.S. Army. Based on more than ten years of research, this was going to be the first book to reveal a systematic anti-Semitic worldview in the upper echelons of a government institution.
Proud of his research, and understood fully what its implications were. But he was somewhat taken aback when I faxed him a document I had put together that I wanted to add to the proposal. It was a bulleted list of the revelations contained in the book. The news hooks.
This list catalogued most provocative new discoveries in the book, the things most likely to make newspaper headlines. It ran to four pages, single-spaced. But the author was very uncomfortable with the whole exercise of distilling his scholarship down to its component factoids. He thought it was somehow tawdry, too insistent. He wasn’t a salesman, and he didn’t like my treating his book like an Omaha steak. (That feeling persisted, at any rate, until I sold it to a publisher.)
Now, I have to confess: I really wonder why this discomfort with salesmanship should be so widespread. I feel that writers, foremost among all people, should be perfectly comfortable with the idea of selling somebody something.
After all, what is writing if not the art of persuasion? With each story, every book, the writer is attempting to persuade the reader that her story is something worth paying attention to. Between the lines of everything she writes, the writer is saying, “I care. This is important. Consider this. Lend me your ears.”
The fact is, professional writers are born salesman. They have to sell sources on the idea of talking to them. They have to sell magazine editors on assigning them a story. And ultimately, the toughest customer of all is the reader. The most resounding rejection a writer can face occurs when the reader yawns, closes the book, puts down the magazine, and goes on to do something else. When that happens, the sales proposition has failed.
The mindset is not mysterious. Think about how you approach the book stacks when you walk into that Barnes & Noble.
That same sense of discrimination you apply when you’re in the book store is exactly what editors apply when they’re looking through the stack of book proposals they have in their office. The short attention span. The impatience with a failure to get to the point. Those famous qualities of editors, and agents, also belong to anyone who reads and who values his or her time.
When you realize how little time you as a bookstore browser give to the titles that are sitting there on the shelves all around you, clamoring for your attention, you can appreciate the manner in which publishing types like me sift through the material in that pile.
And so the fact is that discriminating readers as buyers, understand everything that a discriminating seller, the writer, should know when approaching the market.
Take-away point number one:
Salesmanship, which is so alien and disgusting to so many of us, is the very trade you practice. Maybe you’re an artist. But you’re just as surely a salesman. And what this means is, the ultimate sales pitch is the writing itself. The writing is everything.
When I started as an agent eight years ago, I hadn’t yet fully realized this. When it came to nonfiction, I thought the idea was everything. Come up with a wonderful idea for a book, and find a writer to tackle the idea. That approach gets it exactly backwards. Because the persuasiveness of an idea is only as strong as the writer behind the idea.
Now, good writing has different operative elements depending on the type of book we’re talking about.
Medical book: good writing produces the easy authority and the sense of reassurance that gives the reader the confidence to take the author’s advice.
If it’s a memoir, good writing is the artful, intimate rendering of personal revelations as universal truths.
If it’s a work of history, good writing is the expert craftsmanship that expresses itself in narrative momentum, the establishment of setting, and character development.
The simple truth is this: the thing that agents and editors want most of all is good writing, as the requirements of the category dictate.
THE SALESMAN’S TOOLS
1. Sound Mechanics
In light of this, I feel like it is a waste of time to talk about selling anything, to examine the market for particular types of books, until you’ve mastered at some level the basics of clear exposition. It’s always going to come back to this. Sound mechanics make up the base of the pyramid you’re hoping to build your writing career into.
Now it’s standard form to mention Strunk & White at this point. That little book is the all-purpose shibboleth for wordsmiths everywhere. And with good reason. It’s the most no-nonsense book about writing that we have.
But let me ask this: who here has read the entire book cover to cover? I mean honestly? It’s not a big task. The book is about a quarter inch thick.
Let me hit some of the highlights here. The book is all you need to know about good writing, but the lessons are important to bear in mind. And so here’s a little crash course in this essential book for the writer:
“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short, or avoid all detail and treat his subject only in outline, but that every word tell.” --William Strunk, Jr.
ELEMENTARY PRINCIPLES OF COMPOSITION
14. Use the active voice.
16. Use definite, specific, concrete language.
17. Omit needless words.
4. Write with nouns and verbs.
5. Revise and rewrite.
6. Do not overwrite.
11. Do not explain too much.
14. Avoid fancy words.
16. Be clear.
18. Use figures of speech sparingly.
19. Do not take shortcuts at the cost of clarity.
These declarations are elaborated upon somewhat in the book, and with examples. And if you would like more advice on good writing I would recommend you get ahold of another very good book, William Zinsser’s ON WRITING WELL.
I feel like a sort of schoolmarm obsessing on this boilerplate advice about writing mechanics. But some truths simply cannot be escaped. And the truth here is that before you can develop as a writer and write creatively, you need to put together a toolkit that will help you practice the craft.
The fact is that at least 80% of the book proposals I turn down are rejected because the author’s mastery of the mechanics of prose wasn’t complete.
Gustave Flaubert once said that prose is like hair; it shines with combing.
But good hair isn’t enough. You may be able to string together some good, effective sentences. But to what purpose?? This is where the idea of narrative comes into play.
2. Narrative instinct
If you have an instinct for narrative, you’re going to realize your dreams as a writer. By “narrative” I mean that internally calibrated meter you have that gauges the inherent interest-level in a story. You look at a mass of information before you, and you ask, what is the underlying tale. What are its three acts? Who is its hero? Why do we root for him?
It’s one thing to know how to write. And that’s why Strunk and White will help you to do. It is quite another thing to know what to write about.
This is the talent, if you will, for recognizing the forest for the trees.
One of my clients is H. W. Brands, Bill Brands, a historian at Texas A&M. His next project is a big book on the 1849 Gold Rush. Now it’s a great story, a saga in the truest sense, a tale of outsized ambitions, big money, and great adventures involving people from the four corners of the globe.
Now with a little garden variety newspaper writing, you could get the facts onto paper and relate the events of the story. But storytelling-narrative-requires more. Beyond the story of individual people, it’s also about how America came of age and grew as a nation, built its wealth and technological base on its way to becoming a great power.
Brands is very good at seeing the big picture, the mosaic that’s made up out of lots of individual stories. This is the sense of narrative that I’m talking about. If you, as a writer, are able to see simultaneously the personal and the universal, the big story that comes out of the small one, then you have the sense of narrative that’s necessary to writing nonfiction books for the general readership.
In another of his books, Brands begins the long journey that is his 900-page biography of Teddy Roosevelt, titled TR: THE LAST ROMANTIC, with the following sentence:
“He didn’t sleep much these days. He never had: Four or five minutes a night was all he could stand before motor inside him made him jump up and start moving again. But in those younger days, sleep, the sleep of the honesty exhausted, had come easily once he did get off his feet. Now he was never exhausted, because he was always tired.”
As an author, you need to have the mastery to move the lens in close, right into the face of your individual subjects, THEN pull it back to wide angle, give context, and show the contours of the landscape in which that individual operates. All the best nonfiction writers can do that.
I am not here to drill down on these points and show you how to realize them in your own writing. My sole point is to say this: that when an agent or an editor encounters the work of someone who has this ability, concerns about getting on Oprah recede back to their rightful place as secondary considerations. Creative nonfiction —narrative nonfiction —whatever you want to call it, is driven by writing.
Salesmanship, it’s one of those necessary evils, right? We have to be insistent about the market, and outline in detail the media strategy that will propel our books to the top, right?
Well, I have sold proposals for considerable sums that did not contain a single mention of what the market was for the book, did not explore what television shows should be targeted for publicity, did not once discuss what previous books like it had been bestsellers and why it, too, would therefore sell hundreds of thousands of copies.
As an agent, I don’t need to worry about Oprah as long as I have a proposal that tells a great story, and tells it well, with a sense of shape and purpose, and with a sense of mission on the part of the writer.
A well-crafted proposal will by simple virtue of its excellence suggest the market for itself.
APPLICATIONS
So let’s cut to the chase: how to write a book proposal. There’s a single concept that you have to internalize, and make your own, if you are going to write a good proposal.
Summary.
Summary narrative. What the book is. Why it is valuable. Why it should be published. Why you’re the one to do it.
In essence, you’re writing the jacket copy for the book.
Which means you must position the book.
Your goal here is not to actually write the book, but to write ABOUT the book.
Which is to say, you must be able to describe what you will do in this book, without actually caving into the temptation to begin writing the book itself.
I said the essence of a good proposal is summary narrative. Another term for “summary,” I suppose, is “promise.” What will the book do? This promise is the selling proposition.
Now, I’m going to read you a couple of examples from the writers I’ve worked with. The first is from a proposal for a book about a naval battle in the Pacific that I sold last week to a major house:
This book offers the perfect opportunity to render human, in microcosm, the saga of America’s naval war in the Pacific. And it’s a story unlike any in history, not only for its abundant inherent drama, but also for its importance in the annals of naval lore.
[here we have bullet points explaining why]
Through the well-ordered accretion of incident and detail-faithful to the battle’s chronology and mindful of scholarship that corrects or interprets the first-hand accounts-the book will tell this grand story in a way that no book heretofore has. It will be largely an oral history. But the oral history will hew tightly to a narrative line, the three-hour chronology of the battle, and the 50-hour drama at sea leading to the survivors’ rescue to American cargo ships.
The close focus on individuals will set the book apart from other books on naval combat, works that, as a category, tend to be dehumanized, jargon-filled, operational-level accounts in which ships are more prominent actors than people.
This is the first sentence from H. W. Brands’s book on the gold rush:
On a January morning in 1848, James Marshall discovered gold in the bed of a millrace along the American River in California-and set in motion a series of events that irretrievably altered American and world history.
Does that catch your interest?
The California Gold Rush was the most dramatic mass movement of peoples since the Crusades, and arguably the first genuinely global event of the modern era.
The gold fields enticed the famous and the obscure, the desperate and the curious, the bumbling and the brutal. . . . Preachers and prostitutes, outlaws and judges, doctors and cure-seekers, slaves and abolitionists, poets and illiterates, men seeking wives and women seeking husbands-people of every class, race and profession raced . . . to seize their portion of the new El Dorado.
The journey itself constituted a grand saga, replete with every test of human character and every conceivable outcome. But the journey was only the beginning, for on arrival in California they faced even more daunting challenges. The first to the gold fields could pluck the gold from the ground with the aid of nothing more than a sheath knife or a washpan. But the easy pickings were soon exhausted, and the later arrivals had to work much harder, and with greater ingenuity, to make their fortunes. They redirected rivers, ripped down mountains and burrowed far into the earth to find the magical yellow metal that promised an end to their toils. Many got rich; more got wise. Practical geologists first, they became practicing philosophers.
Now that’s a promise. It’s good stuff, right? Well, in the literary world, this is salesmanship. Narrative is the coin of the realm.
Brands’s great strength is his storytelling ability, and this is the essence of what people talk about when they talk about “narrative.” It’s the all-important ability to command the reader’s imagination, to direct his attention, earn his trust, entertain him, educate him. Each sentence leads inexorably to the next.
So, as I think is clear by now, the proposal becomes sort of a form unto itself. Part of the job of a good proposal is to position your book as a star in the constellation of the market. Where does it fit? What books is it similar to? What does it offer that other books don’t?
Here’s a tip: When you’re talking about competing books, you should generally only talk about books that have been published in the past ten years, or those that are still in print. If all of the books on the subject are OP, that’s an opportunity. If all of the books are more than ten years old, that’s an opportunity too. Also, books published by tiny publishers no one ever heard of really aren’t competition for a major publisher. So in discussing competing titles, worry only about books published by houses everyone’s heard of.
In the proposal you want to generalize about your book in the style of those examples I read earlier. You want to position it, describe it in relation to other books already out there and give a clear sense of where it will fit in the bookstore. But at some point you’ve got to get to the actual contents of the book.
And I think here is where, for many writers, Gary Lavergne’s fire ants come swarming out of the ground.
(Gary—by the way—is famous. He has a big op-ed in today’s NY Times. Check it out.)
What are the actual contents of the book going to be? Well and good as it may be to have the summary, to get a concise, artful selling proposition after the fashion of H. W. Brands, you need to outline how you’re going to set the book up. You’ll need to create a section of your proposal where you summarize the contents of the chapters in100 to 200 words each. And it can be damn hard to do.
You may not have even started your research yet. How are you supposed to know where this story is going to take you?
First, there may be key people you haven’t even interviewed yet. Not only don’t you know what they’re going to tell you, you may not even know if they’ll talk to you at all. How can you outline the book at this point?
Second, even if you’ve already done a bunch of interviews, if your topic is controversial and factually complex, you may not yet know what your conclusions will even be.
Third, you may like Gary Lavergne, and need to write the book first. This question came up yesterday: If you do write the book first, you will STILL need to write a proposal, if only because the proposal remains the most efficient way to communicate the merits of your book to a busy editor.
So what do you do if you fall into either of these three categories. What you have to do, very simply, is come up with a plausible tentative plan. Take a stab at it that makes sense. Outline the chapters in a way that is intelligent, logical, and organized, under the caveat that everything is subject to change. Any editor will understand that. Books change midcourse all the time. Conclusions, emphasis, characters. As long as the fundamental purpose of the book, its promise, remains intact, you will have leeway to construct the book as it needs to be constructed, in collaboration with your editor.
A good approach to proposal writing I’ve seen dispenses entirely with this artifice of specifying chapter breakdowns. In many proposals, it may not yet be entirely clear where chapter breaks should fall. A good way around this is to essentially summarize the story the proposal will tell, in a narration that may go as long as 25 pages or more. The whole pretence of delineating where the chapters begin and end can be done away with.
This works especially well where you have a straightforward chronological narrative, say an account of a disaster, or a battle, or a memoir. If you’re writing a medical book, this sort of approach won’t work, because when you’re proposing a medical program, and a discussion of science that doesn’t necessarily involve narrative first and foremost, you really do need to demonstrate a clear idea of how the program or body of scientific knowledge will be presented.
A good writer can pull this off, can make the summary as good as the book itself. It’s sort of like doing a long, detailed magazine article, and so the benefit of this approach is that even if you don’t sell a book based on your treatment, you might be able to convert it into a magazine article. The magazine article itself, if it’s published, will give you a second bite at the apple, insofar as many book editors may see it and discover the merits of the book in magazine form.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Finally, after you’ve sold summarized the merits of your book and outlined, in some manner, its contents, you will need to sell yourself as the one to write it.
Now, it’s very possible, that the very act of concisely outlining a complex story and summarizing its essence, defining its market, will in and of itself be a sufficiently convincing demonstration of writing ability, that you don’t need to sweat the task of talking about all of your previous jobs, your academic background, and the personal peccadilloes that make you the right writer for the book.
But even then, you will likely need to say something about yourself, and make the case that you, above all others, are the best writer for this project.
You shouldn’t feel inadequate or insecure if you lack of academic or professional credentials. The author of the book on that battle that I read to you doesn’t have any particular credentials to write that book beyond his personal interest in the subject. He sold the book on the strength of a sixty-eight page proposal that summarized the approach he would take in the book, positioned the book vis a vis other military books, and outlined the entirety of the story without breaking down its chapters. As to the About the Author, I’ll read you the entirety of it.
I have come to feel this is a book I was born to write. The exploits of the men who fought in this pivotal battle have fired my imagination since I first read about them as a boy. Their actions have long formed the core of my notions of heroism and patriotism.
I’ve written for an odd variety of magazines and newspapers over the years [then rattles off a few of them] What I may lack in tenure as a military historian I make up in commitment to my subject and in access to the veterans of this battle who survive to this day, and who assemble at reunions annually around the country.
Sort a confessional approach there. Trying to win over the sympathy of the editor, and convey some personal passion, albeit in crisp, factual writing.
And this is a good example of a writer doing two things at once. Explaining who the author is, and selling his commitment to the story - a commitment that, by the way, becomes evident when you read the proposal - and also reinforcing how he’ll do the book, by putting the spotlight on the veterans of the battle.
I feel like I should stop and see if people have any questions. But before I do, let me anticipate one of them:
Trends: There’s always a question about trends. And for good reason. The market for a nonfiction book is so strongly driven by its subject. This becomes clear to writers who have great success with one book, only to discover that the success doesn’t necessarily carry over to their next nonfiction project. The reverse is also true.
So writers focus on trends, and they often want to know what’s selling.
Several strong trends:
Good writing is very much in fashion today.
Powerful storytelling is another trend.
I don’t mean to be completely flip, because there are trends, and they’re obvious, I suppose, by looking quickly at the bestseller list every Sunday.
There is a trend, for instance, toward WWII books right now. What of it?
It’s going to continue in all likelihood - “Pearl Harbor” in May. And FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS is going strong, #7 next Sunday’s NYT list. But I’m not sure the trend matters. At a certain point, watching trends is simply counterproductive.
Publishers have a great of product in the pipeline on WWII right now. People who are trying to ride the trend but sending in second-rate material and relying on the trend to carry them are going to have trouble. When I say “second-rate” I mean professional, publishable material, but material that isn’t inspired.
When I sold this WWII book I’ve been talking about, it was so good that frankly I didn’t worry whether there was too much in the pipeline right now. The book was good enough to stand on its own merits, and be published in any season, no matter the reigning trends. The danger with trends is that they encourage derivative thinking. And when you’re thinking derivative fashion, you’re not going to be inspired to produce a great narrative.
I’ll take some questions now, but let me close with a quotation that I discovered just last night. It’s printed on these wonderful note cards the Writers League put together, featuring quotes from finalists and winners from the Violet Crown awards.
The quote relates nicely to my earlier talk about salesmanship. It’s from Janice Shefelman. It reads:
“A peddler with a dream is MORE than a peddler.”
That’s a sentiment that this salesman can relate to. I’ll take your questions….