Devoted to publishing, publishers and to those who craft the written word

"You are reading the exact same [business books] that thousands of other worker hacks have got on their nightstands. If these books give you any new ideas or new ways of thinking--they will not be original. You read the book like sheep, and now you simply share the wisdom of the herd. What books should you read? Yes, the name of your book group is the Charles Bukowski Book Group, and yes, you should definitely inaugurate the first meeting with a discussion of Post Office."

That's Jeffrey Yamaguchi (editor of the action-packed blog 52 Projects) bashing the endless supply of business handbooks that clog bookstores like a traffic jam.

Yamaguchi's new book, Working For The Man is a hilarious anti-business handbook, teaching creative types around the corporate world how escape the mind-numbing monotony of a dayjob. This week he's our special guest on my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions.

In the spirit of Jack Nicholson's mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing.

Jason Boog:
This is a whole genre that I know very little about. For lack of an official term, I will now call them Humorous Handbooks. I see them everywhere at the bookstore, on my friends' bookshelves, and on bestseller lists, but I have no idea how to develop this sort of  project. Once you conceived this idea, how did you make it a reality?  How did you write your pitch and find editors interested in this kind of writing?

Jeffrey Yamaguchi:
The nice thing about handbooks is that once you have your concept, you can build the book block by block. You outline the chapters and knock them off one by one. Continue reading...

Of course you can do that with any type of material, but I think it’s easier to go from visualization to finished chapter with a handbook. There’s a stand alone aspect to each chapter, and at least for me anyway, it just makes the whole thing seem more doable.

My situation with this book is a little unique in that I have been working around the Working For The Man concept for YEARS. It was a zine, a website, a self-published book of first-person stories, and this is all dating back about 10 years.

For this book, I introduced the “projects” aspect of it, and fleshed out the Working For The Man Rules and other material with the whole projects concept in mind. The pitch pushed “projects,” and I had the benefit of the first  book – 52 Projects – to help make this one happen.
 
But like anything you are pitching, whether you have an agent or not, or an editor interested or not, you go through the same process – you write your one page pitch letter, and you write a full proposal – what your book is, chapter outline, the market, why readers will come to the book, competition, your own bio and more. That process is of course a pain in the ass, but it is a good test to see whether your “idea for a book” actually holds up. You learn a lot about your own idea, and in fact help yourself fine tune what it is you want to do, when you go through that pitch process.