The Back Story of the PNM (III): Selling the Book Proposal
As soon as Esquire named me one of its Best and Brightest and published that story about my super-cool insider brief making the rounds of the Pentagon, I started getting cold calls from literary agents who told me that I just had to pen “the book.” I was somewhat open to the notion, because whenever I briefed “outside” audiences (meaning non-military), numerous people would come up to me afterwards asking where they could buy my book.
Sure, it was fun to pocket a $20 bill promising to send some poor sucker a copy in the mail. But after a couple dozen times and a few threatening phone calls, that scam gets kinda old.
But in all honesty, I really felt (and still do on some level) that any book I would pen would be untranslatable to the masses, for several reasons.
First, those compliments I would get after briefs seemed very groupie-like. In effect, I figured I just dazzled neophytes with my PowerPoint animation and slick delivery. I assumed (hell, I know) that none of them had ever seen anything like my brief—anywhere. But overwhelming people, even professionals and superiors in my business, seemed awfully old hat to me after ten years of giving such high-end animated presentations (yes, I’ve really been giving them THAT LONG; it just took Microsoft about 8 years to catch up to what I was doing with PPT). So basically, I felt I was simply blowing people away with PowerPoint and not much else. I was pretty sure that did not translate into a good book, because the narrative and logic train are very different between the two media.
Second, I felt my stuff was so embedded within the Pentagon mind-set and jargon that it was simply impossible to really make it understandable on the printed page, and that once I was stripped of my visual aids, the material would end up being incomprehensible. Military audiences could get the material naturally, because the military mind is built (or trained) to accept complex subject matter in visual formats. Now, some graphic arts specialists who saw me brief said I could translate the material into a book, but that it would have to be very unconventional in format and very rich in visuals, and I knew such an expensive book would never be made, or if it was, I’d end up hawking it door-to-door like Edward Tufte (although I could do worse). But if that is the best I could hope for, I figured I’d rather just keep on giving the brief—you know, stick with what I was good at.
Third, every time I tried to write my stuff in articles, I had to tone it down dramatically from the brief in order to get it published, thus further reinforcing my sense of being “uncapturable” on paper—even if I could pull it off in terms of personal execution, something I doubted.
Fourth, I make a decent side living giving speeches to private audiences, and I long figured that if I wrote a book it would “give it all away” and thus kill that product line. Although, the higher up the food chain of speakers I moved, the more I began to realize that the guys who got the top dollars did so because they had the name recognition that went with published best-sellers. That was my brother Jerry’s consistent advice—get the book and then you’ll get the speaking fees you want.
But here was the final rub: I was (and still do) make a better living on the side consulting that I do working for the government. I figured—correctly—that to write a book was to accept letting my consulting wane for a long period of time. In effect, I figured I would need to replace anywhere from 6 to 12 months of consulting income if I devoted all those off-hours to a book.
So that was the bottom line: even if I could get past all my standard doubts about being able to translate my material usefully to a book, I just knew I could never get an advance from a publisher that would leave me financially solvent for the time period required to crank out a significant volume of material. In short, it would bankrupt me in the short term and kill my consulting business over the long term, and I’d probably end up with a “significant book” that almost no one bought outside my narrow community.
I had already taken that step with my dissertation, turning that non-page-turner into a very respectable “trade book” that sold about 500 copies—or basically one to every serious academic library in the world. I netted about $500 bucks in royalties, which worked out to about 10 cents per hour of effort put in. I was completely uninterested, as a sole provider for a family of five, in achieving any such prestige, especially when articles seemed to do the trick in terms of keeping the War College happy with my output and consulting and public speaking was far more lucrative—or so it seemed.
Basically, I saw myself in a career/financial/family situation that I could not escape, and frankly, I saw no such need. No one “out there” was waiting for my vision. Hell, I was considered pretty much a freak and a kooky outsider by my own community for most of my career—until 9/11.
When 9/11 hits, a lot of stuff comes together for me, as I lay out in my book’s Preface. Soon, I could see the wider applicability of my material, and its growing descriptive powers for those facing tough decisions within the Pentagon about “transforming” the military. In my 20 months working for Art Cebrowski in the Office of Force Transformation, I came to realize, through the dozens of briefs I offered throughout the Pentagon and defense community, that my vision wasn’t just my own, but that of many others, especially the younger officers moving up the ranks.
Then Esquire names me “The Strategist” and Mark Warren asks me to write the article, and soon after it comes out I get a call from Jennifer Gates of Zachary Shuster Harmsworth, a Manhattan literary agency. Jennifer was everything all of my great mentors are not: female, younger than me, and prone to wide-eyed optimism that rivals my own. I can’t put my finger on exactly how she bowled me over with her pitch, all I can say is that her descriptions of who I am and what I needed to say dovetailed so perfectly with my own personal dreams of self-fulfillment as an author that I was figuratively quite swept away by her enthusiasm and confidence regarding what we could achieve together.
Oh, and she said she could make my desired figure for an advance. No question in her mind. In fact, she figured she could do several times better.
I laughed at this fantastic notion, and through the end of February (just as the tumult of the Esquire PNM article was peaking) I was totally prepared to blow off Jennifer just like the rest of her crowd. It’s just that she was so fun to talk to on the phone (we’ve only met once in person for about two hours) that I was dragging it out. It felt like such a delicious tease to think about a career path I knew was beyond my reach—just so good for my ego. But with the success of the Esquire piece, I was pretty much set on continuing my pathway of giving speeches (I raised my fee immediately), pulling in new consulting clients, and writing my occasional Esquire article to keep the whole bandwagon rolling (I keep pitching Mark Warren on the idea that I could write the best profile ever on Brett Farve—last of the NFL’s Mohicans).
Then a funny thing happened around the same time: by coincidence basically all of my ongoing consulting gigs either ended, or fell apart, or did not materialize as planned. In short, I ran out of money.
All of a sudden, Jennifer’s dream of a book worth writing seemed eminently worth pursuing. So I called her back and we began the arduous and seemingly neverending process of writing a book proposal. When we were finished four months later, it was over 30 pages long. It was probably the most tortuous writing process I have ever been subjected to, because in selling and describing and pitching and plotting out this book, I was forced into a host of crunching calculations about every major idea I’ve ever had in my career. It was the ultimate conceptual mixing bowl, and an enormous personal challenge.
Jennifer was great throughout the entire process in terms of encouragement, but a total pain in the ass regarding her demands about what “just seems to be missing in this one segment here.” She could never actually give me the words, just the sense of what the right pitch would look and feel like in the end. In short, she was like the term paper grader from hell. She “knew” (I was convinced) the right answer, she just refused to let me in one on the G—damn secret, because it wouldn’t be fair unless I worked it out for myself.
Of course, she knew no such thing. All Jennifer really knew, like a Supreme Court justice pondering pornography, was that even though she couldn’t define “it” in any specific manner, she’d recognize it when she saw it. My job was simply to keep plugging away on the monster until she felt satisfied. Problem was, she never seemed satisfied.
And so rewrite after rewrite dragged on for week after week, until late June rolled around and I thought to myself: screw this whole nonsense! I’d grow old before my agent ever felt the piece was good enough to send out, and here I was going into debt and ignoring my consultancy while Jennifer stuck to her guns and kept promising we were “almost there.”
Sure, Jennifer would say things like, “Writing the proposal is really harder than writing the book, because once you have it all organized in your head, that’s half the battle!” And I would simply grimace on the other end of the line, cursing myself for ever believing all the lies she’d fed me over the months. But the more cost I felt I sunk into this endeavor, the more I became obsessed with getting some sort of pay-off, so the longer I kept buying into Jennifer’s seemingly insane optimism about how well this whole process was going.
Finally, after four months of me doing all the work (or so it seemed) and Jennifer simply reading my proposal and declaring “not quite there,” she actually started talking about sending it out to publishing houses. Now, what I did not know at the time was that Jennifer had been working her contacts throughout the publishing world the entire time, pumping them for insights and guidance on what would sell right now, and prepping them like crazy for her “new find.” She was “preparing the battlefield,” in my parlance, and she was doing it with great skill and effort.
About the time she got ready to send me the list of the 24 publishing houses she wanted to send the proposal too, I got cold feet about my ability to actually write the book promised in the proposal. I mean, the proposal just hummed with assurance and ambition, and frankly, I felt very little of that myself. It just felt like such a sales job and little else. Deep down, I just knew I’d never pull it off.
Then in late June I got an offer to leave the War College for something better, and I began thinking, as I always do with such offers, that this was my great escape valve. I just wanted to yell out, Screw all this! Why not ditch this whole restrictive government gig and go make some real money with just one boss, leaving all the hustling of running my own consultancy behind. Plus this would be the perfect way to get out of writing this damn book, which I was just sure would be a failure.
So I told Jennifer that I was pretty much moving toward ditching the whole thing. She was prepared for this, saying that authors often get scared at this point, but that most of the hardest work was behind me (easy for her to say) and that my hoped-for payoff was “just around the corner.” But all I foresaw was Jennifer’s payoff and my being on the hook for the end product, which I knew, for all the reasons cited earlier, would not be translatable to a mass audience.
Deep down, I knew my material was an inch deep and a mile wide—perfect for slick articles for too weak to stretch out over an entire book. I wasn’t ashamed about being superficial; I knew that was an occupational hazard of being a real visionary. But I was certain my stuff was just too idiosyncratic for a broad audience, and I already had my insider audience without the book, so why make the effort if there was no real money in the end and I’d only be preaching to the choir?
But then I remembered that my Esquire article had been so much more than that: it had really touched a far larger audience than I had ever reached before. But how could I ever keep up the high-octane feel of that article over an entire book? That was simply impossible. I had—at best—maybe 20 ideas of that caliber in my portfolio, so 20 times 3,000 words would equate to only a 60k book, by definition a high-concept work that typically only established authors can get away with.
So I was really warming up to the notion of ditching Jennifer and the whole book proposal, until she started in on the “we could get you a collaborator” stuff. Really, I said, what do you mean by that?
Well, she said, it all depends on how much “help” you need. We could go all the way to having you speak into a tape recorder and having someone else write the book for you, to having an established journalist write it with you.
This sort of hand-holding was just what I needed: the notion of hiring someone big to tell me what to do from start to finish. But as I thought about it further, I felt kind of insulted—by my own lack of confidence. I mean, for God’s sake, I’d won writing awards all my life. I wasn’t some baby who needed someone talented to pen it for me; I just needed someone to guide me and keep me on track.
That’s it, I said, all I really need is a writing coach of sorts. You know, a hands-on editor who will work with me from day one to day’s end. And it should be someone just like Mark Warren at Esquire; it should be someone who’s really good at letting me be me but also keeping me focused on getting across what the reader needs in the exact order the reader needs it.
Well, once we got that far in our conversation, it became apparent to both Jennifer and I that I needed to approach Mark himself and cut him into our proposal, percentage and all. In short, the great strategy expert contracted himself a writing expert to go along with his book-marketing expert, and now our proposal was complete.
I felt good about hiring Mark so late in the process because that way I knew this was really my proposal, and not something anyone else ginned up for me. But having Mark in place as my writing coach, I knew I could deliver the goods, because I knew he knew me well and would exhibit the right mix of encouragement and tough love editing when the time came to unleash the beast I felt lay within me, just waiting to get out on the page.
So at the beginning of July, Jennifer finished working the proposal package down to the very last detail, promising it would go out within a week or so. Unable to face the nervous period of waiting on how the various publishing houses might receive the proposal, I immediately went ahead with my long-delayed plans to have my tonsils removed and my throat reshaped to preemptively deal with what I knew would be a sleep apnea problem years down the road (I could see this on the basis of my Dad’s current problem set). I knew the surgery would be easy to withstand, but one followed by a very painful and onerous fortnight of recovery during which eating, sleeping, and talking would be almost impossible for at least a week, with really bad pain lasting through the second week. As someone who suffers a certain addictive personality, the notion of losing myself in two weeks of mind-numbing narcotics seemed just about a perfect escape from driving myself nuts waiting for the phone to ring and Jennifer to deliver the bad news.
So I went through with the surgery two days before the proposal went out from Jennifer’s agency. I was in la-la land the Wednesday the proposal landed on publisher’s desks, and so ignored the following lull that naturally lasted over the weekend. By the time Jennifer began pestering me with feedback the following Monday, I was so mentally depressed from the week of soul-numbing drugs that I almost didn’t give a rat’s ass one way or the other about how it all turned out.
Too bad, because the news was pretty good from Jennifer’s end. Of the 24 houses we pitched, roughly half were interested in responding with a bid, which is a great return for an unknown author with no real track record of selling. So Jennifer started having me exchange emails with interested parties, which I enjoyed doing in my altered state—believing myself to be occupying the highest heights of profundity.
After one interaction in which a conservative imprint passed in response to my answers regarding my political persuasion, Jennifer reported with excitement that G.P. Putnam’s Sons was very interested. No, scratch that, she said. What was really important was that Neil Nyren himself seemed pumped about the proposal, and everyone in the business knows that Neil Nyren doesn’t get visibly pumped very often—cool customer he.
After all, Neil Nyren isn’t just the Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of Putnam, he’s Da Man who’s got Tom Clancy, Clive Cussler, Patricia Cornwall and a host of other huge names in his stable. As far as prize ponies go, this guy knows how to pick’em and groom’em and race’em to win. Jennifer kept going on and on about why Neil would be such a fabulous fit for me, and how everyone in her shop was just so damn excited by his excitement. So much so, in fact, that she said I shouldn’t simply judge Neil’s offer by the money alone. Less money with the right publisher is worth a lot more than the bigger advance from the wrong one.
Right, I said, not understanding what the hell she was talking about. All I saw was the credit card balances growing. I’ll be the next Tom Clancy in another life, I told myself. Right now, I want the money.
Then Neil really surprised us. Jennifer was all set to run an auction on the book proposal, letting the ten or so houses still in the running make their separate bids over the course of a long morning of phone calls, or so it was explained to me (frankly, it still remains a mystery). But the day before the auction was set to run, Neil executes what is known as a preemptive bid. In effect, he says, What will it take to stop this auction? Apparently, this is a normal strategic move, even if it sounds a bit like a car salesman with that old “What will it take to get you to drive outta here in that car today!”
So Jennifer confers with her people and tells me we should have this conversation with Neil, which of course she will handle all by herself. So she tells me the figure they’ve decided upon, and says she’ll call Neil and see if this works for him. If it does, she says, What do you want to do? I say, if he’ll take that number, I’m his on a verbal handshake and a promise to someday meet Tom Clancy in person.
The number she is proposing is a lot bigger than I ever though we’d get, which shows you my business acumen as far as the publishing world is concerned. Frankly, I made only two smart decisions in this process: to pick Jennifer and then to listen to Jennifer, who got me both the deal and Mark Warren to boot.
So I wait with my wife for about an hour, getting about as excited as someone on Demoral can get, and then Jennifer calls back. This is the afternoon of day 7 since we sent out the book proposal. Nyren said yes to the number, and Jennifer said yes to Neil on my behalf. We had just negotiated a deal with one of the world’s largest and most successful publishing houses—and I was only hours away from running out of prescription pain meds.
At first I was elated. Then I thought about Jennifer’s cut, then Mark’s cut, and then Uncle Sam’s cut, and then I realized—my God, this is still about five times more than I expected! What a complete idiot I am!
Of course, when all was said and done and nine months later the book comes out (26 April), I won’t really be sitting on any money, because as it works out, the amount was just about perfect for covering the resulting shortfall in my consulting business. In the end, I got just what I needed and that seems pretty fair.
So even if I haven’t banked much of anything in terms of the advance, it hasn’t cost me anything to have written this book. The hope is, of course, that I will ultimately make my money in selling the book, although even here I don’t really care that much anymore, because I know I’ve written a great book—the book I’ve always dreamed of writing and the book that only I could have written.
The story of how that came about constitutes the last of my four posts telling the Back Story of the Pentagon’s New Map.
Oh, and that bit about not caring about how many units we move . . . that was just a Demoral flashback.
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