Regardless, publishers keep cranking out as many as 11,000 new business books each year, according to the co-authors of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time, which doesn’t account for the untold number of self-published e-books. Publishers don’t seem to have any idea what works. The strategy, if it can be called that, is to flood the market and hope a book floats to the surface. So for every Tipping Point or Freakonomics, there are remainder bins filled with titles such as Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun.
For aspiring megasellers, there are ways to escape obscurity and mediocrity—and reason yet to try. “People trust things that look and feel like books,” says Survival Is Not Enough author Seth Godin. “In a world with too much media, books still represent some territorial skill.” So if you’re determined to venture into the fray and write something that likely won’t be read, will put you thousands of dollars in debt, and could feasibly make you the laughingstock of your industry, here are a few tips in honor of the late, great business writer Stephen R. Covey.
Jack Up Your Klout Score
Business books used to be a genre in which you could become famous because of what you’d written. Nobody knew the names of Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People) or Jim Collins (Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don’t) before they wrote their iconic books. Now you need name recognition or an impressive Klout ranking, a measure of Internet influence.
Jim Cramer, host of CNBC’s Mad Money and author of the bestselling Stay Mad for Life, puts it in the most polite terms possible. “I’m not a celebrity, but I have a recognizable persona,” he says. “I have a brand, so to speak. It’s hubris for me to say this, but I think that’s how you get a book published these days.”
Photograph by G. Paul Burnett/The New York Times/ReduxCramer says he has the all-important 'I know that guy factor'
You have to expand your footprint online. “You’re not Keats writing a poem off in the corner,” says Barbara Monteiro, who runs a New York public-relations firm that specializes in business books. “You have to be part of the conversation. And that means being on Twitter or Facebook (FB).” You’ll know you’re ready when a publisher will put your face on the book jacket. “That’s actually a pretty good criterion,” Cramer concedes. “People need to be able to go, ‘Oh yeah, I know that guy.’ I’ve got the ‘I know that guy’ factor.’ ”
Know the Bountiful Beauty of Brevity
Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, Peter Drucker’s 1974 classic of management literature, ran to 839 pages. “It used to be, whoever wrote the biggest book won,” says Michael Levin, ghostwriter, author of more than 100 books, and a regular guest on ABC’s (DIS)Shark Tank. No longer. “There’s nobody today who would read an 800-page Drucker book unless it was on the final exam at a business school.”
So what’s the ideal length? Kenneth Blanchard, co-author of bestsellers such as The One Minute Manager and Who Moved My Cheese? suggests 100 pages or less. “When we first shopped around One Minute Manager in the early 1980s, nobody in New York would touch us,” he remembers. “Everyone was like, ‘Who’s going to pay $15 for a book that’s 100 pages and most of it’s white space?’ ” As it turns out, quite a few: 13 million, if you go by Blanchard’s website; 539,000, according to Nielsen BookScan.
“I saw a guy give a motivational speech recently,” Blanchard says. “He had seven secrets to success, and it took him 45 minutes to do the first four. You could see the audience squirming in their seats. They were, like, ‘Oh God, there are three more?’ ”
Animals Are Your Best Friend
Ninety-three-year-old Martin Levin, author of last year’s All I Know About Management I Learned From My Dog, is living proof that animal metaphors are still the industry standard. After struggling to find a U.S. publisher for a small first run, his book has since been reprinted in 10 countries—a global impact that even Levin, with 60 years’ experience in the book industry, never expected. “Nobody in the U.S. knows who I am,” he says. “Every day I get another copy of my book written in a language I can’t even read. It’s a riot.”
Pay Someone Handsomely to Write It for You
The typical advance for an unknown author for his or her first book is around $10,000. “Since the recession, publishers have tried to reduce or eliminate advances,” says Michael Levin, who’s co-written or ghostwritten books for Zig Ziglar, Michael Gerber, and Jay Abraham. “I’ve seen some extremely big-name people offered zero advances for their books. And I’ve seen them take it.”
