Seven Secrets of a Business Book

By Henry Dubroff
January 28, 2009

During the past year, my co-author Susan J. Marks and I spent many hours working on our book: “Battling Big Box: How Nimble Niche Companies Can Outmaneuver Giant Competitors.”

Now it’s in print and I am spending a good part of every week doing phone interviews with radio stations all around the country and working on book signings.

This column will describe seven things they’ll never tell you about writing a business book, but before I begin, I want to give you a little background.

For years, Susan, a former Denver Post colleague turned successful freelancer writer and author, had been bugging me about turning the diaries I have kept since founding the Business Times into a nonfiction book.

At first, I was not enthusiastic about the plan. My handwriting is terrible. And I knew that looking back at nine years of past mistakes was going to be painful and frankly I did not have the time.

But in 2005, one of our local banks asked me to deliver a series of lectures at its annual economic symposium. For my lectures, I developed a catalog of characteristics of successful niche companies and began to collect anecdotes.

The habits of successful niche companies became my mantra and suddenly a book looked more plausible. Susan and I reached a “Jersey Boy” style handshake agreement to split everything 50-50. Soon we had a book concept, then an outline, then an agent, then a book contract with Career Press of Franklin Lakes, N.J.

That’s when the fun ended. Here are seven things you don’t know about taking on a nonfiction book project.

YOU NEED A ROAD MAP - Our book was closely orchestrated from the beginning. It starts with an old-fashioned outline which serves as both direction and limitation. The latter is essential because you don't realize how much you know until you attempt to translate it on paper in a manageable form. I scraped as many anecdotes as I could from the diaries on our key characteristics—employee empowerment, branding, sales, cash management and innovation. We tried to find business owners and experts we knew who could talk about each area. Susan went out and found more experts and we began to develop data on small business and niche business formation from Census Bureau, Small Business Administration and Commerce Department databases.

BRACE YOURSELF FOR A THREE-RING CIRCUS OF NEW RELATIONSHPS - All of a sudden there were queries and e-mail exchanges from the publisher, the graphic artist working on the cover, our agent and later on the PR firm hired by the publisher to pitch the book. You have to really think before you hit the send button. For Susan and me, I think there was a conscious effort to not respond until the two of us were on the same page. But the e-mails just kept coming.

IT TAKES A TON OF SCHMOOZING - Even with all of the preparation there were still daunting tasks. For example, we had to get in touch with top business experts and business owners on the go. Getting people like Kinko’s Founder Paul Orfalea to talk on the phone or by e-mail wasn’t easy. Neither was getting former brew pub owner/ Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper to take time from raising money for the Democratic National Convention to talk on the phone. Susan worked over a list of business contacts, their contacts, and business owners to understand exactly the secrets to their success. We talked to almost all the people we set out to interview—and met some new folks along the way, too.

BUILD A TEAM OF SPECIALISTS - In the end, my drafting of ideas to frame the chapters helped shape the book. About halfway through the process, I came up with the idea of using excerpts from my diaries and calling them, “From the Trenches.” It was a device that gave the book a more personal feel and a bit more texture. But I must confess a lot of the hard slogging was done by Susan. More slogging was done by Kris McGovern, a copy editor who helped fine-tune the manuscript and by Laura Polland, a former Business Times staff writer, who helped put together permissions from all the people we quoted.

PERSPECTIVE REALLY HELPS - For the better part of a week in October, as the first draft was headed to the publisher, I had a fellowship at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. I had an office, a laptop and access to a very fast printer. We cranked through a draft of the entire book and I had the luxury of being able to take a couple of days to go through it until my eyes and brain went blank.

THERE ARE UPS AND DOWNS - After my fellowship ended and I got through a flurry of corrections and revisions, everything went blank while the book went to the publisher. It was kind of weird and then all of a sudden “Battling Big Box” popped up for sale on Amazon.com—a month before our official Jan. 15 publication date. It was a real high. But my author copies didn’t arrive for another week or two. And then I had a bad post-publication let down—I couldn’t look inside it for a week after it arrived.

THE REAL WORK BEGINS AFTER PUBLICATION - In our 50-50 scenario, I am the chief marketing person. This means I could be up at 5.45 a.m. Pacific Time to pitch the book on drive-time radio on the East Coast. Career Press seems happy; the PR firm they hired keeps getting me radio gigs. Susan wants more sales so she can send her daughter to college and I just sold five books at a coffee klatch in Oxnard for a networking group.

The author’s life is not easy. But I’m glad we produced a book that’s honest to the values that make successful niche companies. Hopefully, our book will help sow the seeds for future niche company successes in a tough economic time.

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Copyright © 2009 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism