Self-Publishing or Trade Publishing: Which is Best for Your Business Book?

LinkedIn, July 29, 2017

by Theodore Kinni



As a business writer and editor, I talk to lots of people who want a business book with their name on it. CEOs and other senior executives who are transitioning to new careers. Consultants who are establishing thought leadership platforms. Entrepreneurs who are building businesses. Speakers who want bigger audiences and something to sell at the back of the room. At some point or another, they all ask me the same question: Should I self-publish my book or find a publisher?

There is no pat answer. It depends on the book and what you want to achieve with it. But here are the three questions to ask to figure out the right answer for you. Read the rest here.

Scott Adams on ghostwriting

Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, has a new book out--How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life (Portfolio, 2013)--which is a funny take on the memoir-cum-personal-success-manual genre. Paging through it brought to mind a Dilbert strip that my cousin clipped out of a newspaper and mailed to me, in an envelope through the US Postal Service--just like in the olden days. The strip cracked me up so much that I emailed Adams to see if I could buy a signed copy. (No answer. Bet he's never gotten one of those emails before.) Anyway, here it is: 

Marty Sklar's reflections on Disney

My book post on the s+b blog this week is about an insider's view of Disney-style leadership and language:

Leadership Lessons from the World of Walt Disney

I’ve been enjoying Marty Sklar’s memoir Dream It! Do It!: My Half-Century Creating Disney’s Magic Kingdoms (Disney Editions, 2013). Sklar is a legend in the Walt Disney Company (literally) and among Disney aficionados worldwide. He joined the company as a summer intern in the public relations office in 1955, a month before Disneyland opened. After graduating from UCLA in 1956, he returned to Disney as a full-time employee and stayed until his retirement in 2009. Sklar spent most of his career in Walt Disney Imagineering, the company’s design and development subsidiary, and served as its president from 1987–1996.

Dream It! Do It! reveals that Sklar was also Walt Disney’s go-to ghostwriter for much of the last decade of his life, and it provides a firsthand description of Walt’s leadership style during that momentous period in the company’s history. When Sklar joined the company, Walt was a veteran leader who had made a big bet: He was launching a new, unproven business that most everyone predicted would be a flop, including his own brother Roy, who held the purse strings at Disney. When Walt pitched him the idea for Disneyland, he refused to back it. Walt forced Roy’s hand by forming a new company and financing the planning on his own. Eventually, Roy relented. It was a smart decision: In 2012, Disney’s parks and resorts business generated US$12.9 billion in revenue...read the rest here

Elmore Leonard said...

Elmore Leonard passed away today at age 87. I haven't read any of his westerns, but I read many of his crime novels and always got a lot of pleasure from them. He was a crisp, clear, no-BS writer. He also published a short how-to book on writing back in 2007 that was based on the following 10 rules:

1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" …he admonished gravely
5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.
6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose."
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

Vonnegut on writing well

Who says ads are a waste of time? Well, I usually do, but then I came across an International Paper Company ad from the early '80s. The company asked Kurt Vonnegut to write an ad titled "How to write with style." Here's what he wrote:

Newspaper reporters and technical writers are trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writings. This makes them freaks in the world of writers, since almost all of the other ink-stained wretches in that world reveal a lot about themselves to readers. We call these revelations, accidental and intentional, elements of style.

These revelations tell us as readers what sort of person it is with whom we are spending time. Does the writer sound ignorant or informed, stupid or bright, crooked or honest, humorless or playful - ? And on and on.

Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you're writing. If you scribble your thoughts any which way, your readers will surely feel that you care nothing about them. They will mark you down as an egomaniac or a chowderhead - or, worse, they will stop reading you.

The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not. Don't you yourself like or dislike writers mainly for what they choose to show you or make you think about? Did you ever admire an empty-headed writer for his or her mastery of the language? No.

So your own winning style must begin with ideas in your head.

1. Find a subject you care about

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.

I am not urging you to write a novel, by the way - although I would not be sorry if you wrote one, provided you genuinely cared about something. A petition to the mayor about a pothole in front of your house or a love letter to the girl next door will do.

2. Do not ramble, though

I won't ramble on about that.

3. Keep it simple

As for your use of language: Remember that two great masters of language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote sentences which were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound. "To be or not to be?" asks Shakespeare's Hamlet. The longest word is three letters long. Joyce, when he was frisky, could put together a sentence as intricate and as glittering as a necklace for Cleopatra, but my favorite sentence in his short story "Eveline" is this one: "She was tired." At that point in the story, no other words could break the heart of a reader as those three words do.

Simplicity of language is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred. The Bible opens with a sentence well within the writing skills of a lively fourteen-year-old: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."

4. Have guts to cut

It may be that you, too, are capable of making necklaces for Cleopatra, so to speak. But your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.

5. Sound like yourself

The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was Conrad's third language, and much that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.

In some of the more remote hollows of Appalachia, children still grow up hearing songs and locutions of Elizabethan times. Yes, and many Americans grow up hearing a language other than English, or an English dialect a majority of Americans cannot understand.
All these varieties of speech are beautiful, just as the varieties of butterflies are beautiful. No matter what your first language, you should treasure it all your life. If it happens not to be standard English, and if it shows itself when you write standard English, the result is usually delightful, like a very pretty girl with one eye that is green and one that is blue.

I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am. What alternatives do I have? The one most vehemently recommended by teachers has no doubt been pressed on you, as well: to write like cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago.

6. Say what you mean

I used to be exasperated by such teachers, but am no more. I understand now that all those antique essays and stories with which I was to compare my own work were not magnificent for their datedness or foreignness, but for saying precisely what their authors meant them to say. My teachers wished me to write accurately, always selecting the most effective words, and relating the words to one another unambiguously, rigidly, like parts of a machine. The teachers did not want to turn me into an Englishman after all. They hoped that I would become understandable - and therefore understood. And there went my dream of doing with words what Pablo Picasso did with paint or what any number of jazz idols did with music. If I broke all the rules of punctuation, had words mean whatever I wanted them to mean, and strung them together higgledy-piggledy, I would simply not be understood. So you, too, had better avoid Picasso-style or jazz-style writing, if you have something worth saying and wish to be understood.

Readers want our pages to look very much like pages they have seen before. Why? This is because they themselves have a tough job to do, and they need all the help they can get from us.

7. Pity the readers

They have to identify thousands of little marks on paper, and make sense of them immediately. They have to read, an art so difficult that most people don't really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high school - twelve long years.

So this discussion must finally acknowledge that our stylistic options as writers are neither numerous nor glamorous, since our readers are bound to be such imperfect artists. Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient readers, ever willing to simplify and clarify - whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales.

That is the bad news. The good news is that we Americans are governed under a unique Constitution, which allows us to write whatever we please without fear of punishment. So the most meaningful aspect of our styles, which is what we choose to write about, is utterly unlimited.

8. For really detailed advice

For a discussion of literary style in a narrower sense, in a more technical sense, I recommend to your attention The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White (Macmillan, 1979). E.B. White is, of course, one of the most admirable literary stylists this country has so far produced.

You should realize, too, that no one would care how well or badly Mr. White expressed himself, if he did not have perfectly enchanting things to say.

Approaching thought leadership

One of the major benefits of working as a senior editor for Booz & Company's strategy+business is the opportunity to work with its editor-in-chief, Art Kleiner. Art is a leading business writer and editor - he's worked with business thinkers like Peter Senge, Arie de Geus,and Noel Tichy.

When I first started working with Art, he told me about his simple, but hardly simplistic, approach to analyzing thought leadership, which uses four questions, or orientations:

• What is your purpose?
• What research is the work based on, and how credible is it?
• Who is your audience?
• What is the story?

The other day, Art elaborated on this analytical framework in a webinar for Leading News, an online leadership community created by Patricia Wheeler and Marshall Goldsmith. If you're associated with creating thought leadership or aspire to become a thought leader, the audio replay is well worth your time (listen here: http://ow.ly/8U4cp). Art was also kind enough to provide a great deck on thought leadership, which accompanied the talk (see http://slidesha.re/zAuu3v).

In support of plain English

Who knew there was a National Plain English Day? There is, in the UK at least, and last December, the Local Government Association celebrated by publishing the LGA ‘non-word’ list, 100 words that all public sector bodies should avoid when talking to people about the work they do and the services they provide. Words on the list include: coterminosity, empowerment, multidisciplinary, place shaping, and sustainable communities. The LGA suggests that unless "local authorities talk to people in a language that they can understand then the work they do becomes inaccessible and reduces the chances of them getting involved in their local issues."

Chairman of the Local Government Association, Sir Simon Milton, said:“Plain English Day is a timely reminder for all of us that we can not, must not and should not hide behind impenetrable jargon and phrases...Why do we have to have ‘coterminous, stakeholder engagement’ when we could just ‘talk to people’ instead?“

The list is back in the news this month because a local council in England wanted to ban the word "brainstorming" to avoid offending epileptics and replace it with "thought showers."

It's a good lesson for business writers, consultants, and managers, too. Although I would hate to give up "stakeholder" which has always reminded me of killing vampires.

Can you say work-for-hire?

John McDonald was a long-time editor at Fortune and the ghostwriter of Alfred P. Sloan's My Years at General Motors. McDonald's posthumous book, A Ghost's Memoir, recounts his collaboration with Sloan and the story of how GM's lawyers, convinced that Sloan's memoir would hurt the company in its ongoing antitrust battle with the US government, tried to kill the book. Sloan agreed to bury it, but McDonald sued GM to force publication and won.

Notwithstanding the fact that McDonald's chutzpah in taking on the world's largest corporation resurrected what turned out to be a classic of the business genre, the story serves as an important cautionary tale for anyone thinking about hiring a ghostwriter. Make sure you own full rights to your book! It's called a work-for-hire contract and it ensures that the ghost can't force you to do anything with it that you don't want to do. There are couple of more tips on hiring and working with a ghost in this article I wrote for Chief Executive last year.