As a former literary agent, friends and family are constantly asking me advice on how to get their book published. And since I end up giving out the same information over and over again, I thought I’d share a recent email I sent to a friend.

Chris emailed me because his friends have a b-to-b title they’d like to shop around. Being that the authors are M.I.T. graduates and have a successful medical consulting company, they have a pretty solid chance of getting noticed by a professional/medical book publisher. Here’s what I recommended.

//

Hi Chris,
Ian sent me your email. My experience is in consumer publishing, so I don’t have any editor contacts in the b-to-b sphere. However, some of the same search tactics still apply.

I did a search on Amazon for professional>medical books and got this result.

From this search, you’ll be able to identify book publishers who publish in your category. This is a good way to figure out who you should submit your proposal or manuscript to.

(NOTE: Chris doesn’t necessarily need an agent because his project is a professional/technical title. See below for more info on whether or not you need an agent.)

Once you narrow down your list, go to each publisher’s website to get specific instructions on how they want material submitted. And by all means, follow their guidelines so your manuscript doesn’t get trashed by some intern who was told to go through the pile and light fire to any submission that doesn’t fit their submission criteria–seriously!

McGraw-Hill is a good publisher, and you’d want their Professional-Medical division. From their description, your book would be right on target:
“McGraw-Hill MEDICAL provides students and professionals with the global standard of best healthcare practices by delivering current and comprehensive resources from leading authors and institutions.”

Here’s their page for authors who want to submit proposals.

They have a series of pages about submissions, and you’d want to be sure to go through their checklists before submitting.

In this case, it looks like they would want to see the full manuscript (vs. a book proposal).

However, if you find that other publishers want a proposal and if you need help writing one, I highly recommend the book How to Write a Book Proposal by Michael Larsen.

//

More about finding a Literary Agent
Authors hoping to get published by a mainstream consumer publisher (Random House, Penguin Putnam) will need an agent. Most mainstream publishers no longer accept submissions directly from authors. And no author should even think about signing a publishing contract with having an agent or experienced publishing lawyer (i.e. not your brother-in-law, the criminal lawyer) reviewing it first.

Don’t be stingy about giving away some of your royalties, even if you already have an offer in the bag. There are hundreds of stories about an author who didn’t fight for film rights—or foreign rights or that extra ½ percent—who got royally screwed. Agents typically have “boilerplate” contracts on file with major publishers. These boilerplate contracts represent years of haggling with the publisher’s legal department.

How to find a literary agent? Start by reading the acknowledgments page of your favorite titles in your category. Authors usually thank their agents, and agents tend to be interested fresh takes on the same topics. Don’t fret if a junior agent expresses interest in your project—do you really want to share an agent with Stephen King?

Additional tools for finding a literary agent:

• 2009 Guide to Literary Agents by Chuck Sambuchino
• Jeff Herman’s Guide to Book Publishers, Editors & Literary Agents 2009
• Thinking Like Your Editor: How to Write Great Serious Nonfiction–and Get it Published by Susan Rabiner
• MediaBistro.com’s “Pitching an Agent” column

But don’t just find the agent: find the agent who is going to add the most value.

In his recent post, “Where Have All the Agents Gone,” Seth Godin wrote, “Literary agents are crucial when publishers believe that their choice of content is essential but have too many choices and too little time. But publishers don’t trust every literary agent. They trust agents they believe in. Key point: anonymous agents are interchangeable and virtually worthless.”

Good luck!

–Britta

It’s not Billy Mays’ fault that his voice could drive a train down a dirt road.

How many times have you peacefully dozed off in front of the TV, a dog snoozing under each arm, only to be slapped into consciousness by:

I have removed startled dachshunds from my neck one too many times.

Apparently, loud commercials are also the bete noir of California Congresswoman Anna G. Eshoo, who introduced the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act last June. The bill would prohibit commercials from being broadcast louder than the programs they reside in.

The advertising industry is: a) up in arms about any more federal regulation of what they do and how they do it; b) denying that commercials are being broadcast louder than TV programs; and c) admitting that making the commercials louder may be annoying, but it is effective in getting people’s attention.

They’ve been drinking too much of their own Kool-Aid again. Do they really think that making consumers angry is the way to go? I know that annoying commercials have never gotten me to buy anything and have made me vow to never buy certain products, including everything pitched by the stentorian Mr. Mays.

Online, the ad assault on the senses continues, with purveyors of rich media advertisements continually coming up with new ways to annoy. Pock-up blocker enabled? Too bad. We’ve got your flashy, shaking ads, your auto-play video ads, your expandable ads (those awful things that fold across the page or explode in size when you mouse over them) and your floating ads (the ones that bob and weave across the page, daring you to click on the little “x” that will make them go away, then moving at the last second so you click on the ad anyway).

And with people up-armoring their browsers to block all advertising, what’s a marketer left to do? What is left behind once the ads are gone?

Content.

Learn to love it. It’s the final frontier.

For the past few weeks, my existence has consisted of eating, sleeping, working and daydreaming about a tortoise. Discouraged by my new landlord’s no pet policy, a tortoise seemed a perfect low-profile pet candidate. My imaginary but soon-to-be pet tortoise is a girl and has a name—Priscilla.

To the best of my knowledge, a tortoise doesn’t bark or meow or chew up the baseboards. Best of all, tortoises are herbivores, so Priscilla won’t require any mashed up meat from a can.

After a week or two of dreaming about Priscilla, my fantasy was interrupted by a harsh dose of reality: tortoises hibernate. For several months. All winter long. I decided that Priscilla can not be, because when she hibernates, I will miss her too much.

If Priscilla were a website, we’d tell her that a hibernating site is a site no one wants.

We’d say, “Priscilla, before you become part of the world wide web, you need to get this through your exoskeleton:”

• What is going to keep your audience engaged and coming back and wanting more?

• Will your content hold your audience’s attention with it’s every move?

• Will your audience be unable to resist photographing it to document every new development and forwarding updates to family, friends and everyone and anyone else in their contact list?

Don’t let your content curl up for a couple of months and go to sleep while your audience checks back, obsessively at first, looking for any sign of life, then frequently, then seldom and then, maybe . . . not at all.

–Wendy Joan

PS. I’ve just learned that not all tortoises hibernate. And even the species that do can be kept awake if they find a good domestic setting. Which just goes to show that even if your content is suiting up for a long winter’s nap, there’s still time to change it’s natural instinct to ensure it never hibernates again.

Last Sunday, The New York Times Style section featured Gwyneth Paltrow’s new newsletter/blog project, GOOP.

GOOP (Gwyneth’s initials, although we never find out what the double O’s stand for) features G-Palt’s wisdom on everything from family-friendly recipes to assembling a fail-proof mommy uniform. I visited the site Sunday morning right after I read the article, and I signed up for the newsletter (who wouldn’t want banana-nut muffin recipes and fashion advice and from Gwynnie?).

But apparently the GOOP team wasn’t expecting the article to run that Sunday. In the Style section. As the lead feature.

Fair enough. I’d give them some time to scramble for more server space.

A few hours later, same error message.

And today, four days later, same error message.

Where is Gwyneth’s web team? How many hundreds, thousands, millions of subscribers have they lost from this oversight?

UPDATE: Strangely enough, I just received a newsletter from GOOP, as though their “something went terribly wrong” never happened. What??

TAKEAWAY: Crazy that we even have to say this, but it’s never okay to skip any form of testing (load testing, browser testing, user testing and re-testing, etc.). Never. But especially when you know you are about to receive national media attention.

–Britta

Confession: Up until this week, I’ve been building production schedules in Excel. It’s something I started in my early 20’s at Ammirati Puris Lintas, where I wore miniskirts and three-inch heels and tracked 100 unique print ads a month for the Dell account.

(That was before my eventual transition down to the creative floor, where, as a copywriter, I wore red corduroys and green Nikes and got to hang out in the creative lounge dreaming up campaigns for Montblanc and Marriott. Life was much better on the 35th floor.)

After hammering out dates for a July launch only to realize that a September launch would make much more sense, I loathed the thought of reworking the entire schedule. Which is when my brilliant partner Ian informed me that everyone else in the office uses ConceptDraw to build their production schedules.

Is this a print vs. web thing?

Lured in by the pretty colored lines that show intersecting milestones, I downloaded ConceptDraw and got to work. I endured multiple crashes and some annoying usability issues, but I got through it. And the launch date still wasn’t quite right.

Which is when I realized just how much extra work I had been creating for myself as an Excel devotee (er, dinosaur). Because a Gantt chart calculates the total number of days for each project phase, all I had to do was plug in the new launch date and—presto magic!—the schedule updated itself. It even knew the difference between work days and weekends.

Sometimes it’s shocking to realize ways in which you are (i.e. I am) behind the times. I use Mint.com on my iPhone. I Twitter occasionally. We play Pandora in the office on our George. I’m a slave to Basecamp and Backpack for project management, and can even work my way around Dreamweaver. So why was I still using Excel for my production schedules?

Because that’s the way I’d always done it.

Which goes to show that just like our clothes closets (i.e. miniskirts and chunky heels), our Applications folders could use a seasonal assessment.

Meanwhile, I wonder if could still rock the red cords?

–Britta

After re-posting this story — Content Management Systems Just Don’t Work — forwarded to me by the ever-capable robotics ninja/programmer/genius/good guy Gabe Hollombe. Destry Wion RT’ed and mentioned on Twitter to “see comments” in said story.  The story, written by Clay at Sunlight Labs, argues that it’s more cost-and-feature effective to hire a programmer to make a custom CMS, than it is to work within the constraints of an off-the-shelf solution.

*Having wrestled with many CMS solutions, from Vignette to Wordpress, I concur, “Do you concur?”

But if you keep scrolling—past the last period—the story continues and evolves. Different CMS aficianados shot back in the comments and a meta conversation began to bubble and brew. This, and that 100 dances in 100 days in 100 locations video, are the reasons I love the web. First, I get a well-written/researched article about CMS solutions vs. custom development and then (bonus), I get content threads splintering off into: new solutions, the question of what a CMS is actually supposed to do, security issues, costs and “power pie.”

Personally, I don’t put too much weight into how many ✮’s an article has, how the author is ranked or the number of Diggs a story receives—if there are a lot of comments, my interest is piqued. When the story touches a nerve it is passed around and as it is passed around the POV changes and as the POV changes we get a sneak peek into what others see, feel and know/don’t know.

Today, we are in such a rush to present the latest nizzer info we have found, or broadcast triumphantly from our cardboard podiums that we forget the benefit of this web thing is the iterative, additive nature of the conversation. I too am guilty of the simple “cool article dude”, comment. But when an article educates or inspires and the ensuing comments build atop what the article started—that just lights my fire.

So go on, create/find an interesting story, Tinyurl it, tweet it through Tweetdeck, push it through Friendfeed and into the Facebook-Twitter app. Perhaps the story will get blogged about, and then pushed to Digg and/or mentioned in other blog posts, which will get pushed into Facebook again and LinkedIn. Don’t stop that process; just don’t forget, as Destry Wion reminded me—a lot happens past that last period.

–Ian

This article about in Boston.com about how “slackers” have (supposedly) skated past the recession drama-rama brought up good points but contained a few logical flaws. For me, it was an “I see both sides of that coin” moment.  A feeling very similar to my experience of spelling the word, “environment” (en-vahy-ruhn-muhnt), and the aggravation I have with that damn sneaky “n” continually masquerading as if it belonged there. Damn “n”.

Follow me here…this got me thinking about:

1 . If the creative’s blurry line between self-satisfaction/work/ and moving fast leaves them lacking foundation or the relevant experience that taking the long road does. And how big company management may lack the ability to move fast due to bloated infrastructures.

2 . How companies are very clearly run by the creatives or the management. And how this is usually established right on the home page.

Razorfish — (wait, wait let the dots load) = creatives.

OMD —  (very “us” focused) = management.*

3. If the question of, is A better than B, really the right question? The question more aptly may be, who can adapt to the new rules faster, cheaper and better.*

The bet on red: management focused companies use their six-sigma certifications and good ol’ boy handshakes to hire creatives, reduce overhead and change their culture from tortoise to hare.

From Boston.com article (comments)

“When Atlas shrugs, these lightweight Gen-Xer types will be the first to fall off his shoulders.
I love the fact that i work my posterior off to pay for these slackers, and yes, they are slackers, to fritter their collective lives away tipping at socialistic windmills and thinking small. If our fore bearers did this, we’d be wearing skins and living in yurts…and yelling our opinions at each other!! Mr. Scharfenberg you are the perfect O-bot!! America’s call used to be “aim high.” I fear it’s being changed to “aimless.”

Or, the bet on black: creatives harness their understanding of ever changing technologies and multi-tasking to build viable, profitable businesses.

From Boston.com article

“We brought you the Internet, worked on green technology, and filled the ranks of Teach for America. We crossed the color line, ate local produce, and bought secondhand clothing. We lived in smaller spaces, drove smaller cars, and took the subway to work.”

*Either one of these bets could prove successful over time but we don’t have time. There is that old adage that you can have two of the following the three elements in a product or service, but not all three.

✓ Cheap

✓ Good

✓ Fast

This new economy has made fast, or better put “nimble”— a prerequisite. And this leaves “cheap and good” sans parapets, with new positions to defend.

Creative led companies have to stick to their guns but must learn to diversify clientele, services and strengthen their management foundation. Translation—balance time spent on market research and projected cash flow with Twittering about the napkin quality at your local watering hole and submitting things to Found Magazine. Creatives need to understand that hiring one suit with an MBA to play bad cop isn’t going to cut it. There needs to be internal adoption of business fundamentals. This is where “good and cheap” get put under a microscope and where big business has a leg up.

Management led companies on the other hand need to figure out “fast”, fast. (See the well-worn example of 37 Signals.) Creatives already have that figured out. By the time you’ve had your 4th meeting about the corporate redesign and deciphered that usability study, they have redesigned the redesign.  Management needs to buy into a new culture of transparency and make sure their new message/service resonates with a new management style. Translation = they should take the photos of senior management in the old “suit-and-tie semi-circle” off their site. (I’m not sensing insights, ideas or results by viewing this photo. Instead I’m intimidated.)

The race is on. We are figuring it all out too. Place your bets and tip the croupier.

—Ian

If you’ve ever watched an episode of Hell’s Kitchen or Kitchen Nightmares, you have seen (and heard) the F-bomb machine that is Gordon Ramsay. It takes a lot of moxie to walk into someone else’s business and tell them they don’t know their a*$ from their elbow, but episode after episode Ramsay does it. While both shows are entertaining, Kitchen Nightmares showcases some quality project management and problem solving skills bloody relevant to content strategy solutions.

Here is the flow of the show:

1. Assess the problem as an outside observer—Ramsay inspects the restaurant, staff and food.

*Content strategists need to find the root of the problem. Is the design struggling due to limitations with the CMS? Is the CMS choking because of an IT issue? Is the content irrelevant because of usability issues?

2. Inspect the systems being used to manage the team/projects—Ramsay watches the way employees interact and inspects the physical and interpersonal ways they distribute information from management, to the front of the house staff, on to the back of the house staff and back to management.

*Content strategists often play the role of cartographers. They take migration maps, design specs, software limitations, internal politics, wishes-on-horses, the beggars-that-ride and put the puzzle pieces together. When they are one of many vendors on a project they must stitch together vendor and client systems from: Word, Excel, online collaborative tools, Visio docs, XML, forwarded emails, IM’s and phone calls. It ain’t always fun and it ain’t always easy.

3. Remove/replace unproductive team members. Simplify complicated systems. Create authenticity, transparency and accountability—Most of the F-Bombs and “you Donkey” comments are saved for this portion of the show, this is when Ramsay gets hands-on with the staff, operations and makes projectiles out of overcooked salmon and soggy veggies.

*Content Strategists are most effective if brought in at the outset of a project but often they parachute in during the middle of a project. When that happens, identifying your strong and weak links is essential. Create new transparent systems and get all vendors, team members and management focused on the same goal.

4. Give the new system a test run. Assess. Repeat—Chef Ramsay’s new menu is usually a struggle the first dinner service. There is usually push back from management and staff but in the end he reviews, adjusts and makes it work.

*The process of creating a content strategy is…a process. It is a living, fluid monster that learns and moves and occasionally leaves a little present in the middle of the room for you after a long day at work. The ongoing execution of a content strategy takes work, in our experience at least two cycles, before finding a balance between stakeholder/content creator/editor and end-user. Be patient. Execute one, cohesive strategy. Have lots of paper towels on hand.

A successful content strategy consists of many sciences, oftentimes multiple vendors and the ability to be both uber-macro and atomically micro. Though Information Architecture doesn’t embrace all categories it is incredible useful for the heavy lifting, “whose bucket does this go in”, decision-making.  Here is a great outline and introduction to Information Architecture sans F-Bombs and cockroaches.

“In today’s fast-paced world, everyone’s looking for a shortcut. It can be very difficult to convince people, particularly senior mangers with little hands-on web experience, of the importance of taking the time to do research and develop a solid strategy…The immediate perception of progress feels good but often comes at the expense of overall efficiency and effectiveness. Since information architecture forms the foundation of the entire web site, mistakes made here will have a tremendous ripple effect.”

Morville & Rosenfeld
Information Architecture-for the World Wide Web
1998

—Ian

Ian and I had lunch yesterday with our wicked smart “virtual CFO,” Joey Brannon. Since Eat Media’s inception, Joey, who owns Axiom CPA, has been our right hand financial man. We tell him our goals, he helps us make the right choices and he isn’t afraid to hold our feet to the fire. (Plus he draws right on his window, which is super cool and keeps us creative types engaged as he talks about FUTA and SUTA.)

Some of the many lessons I’ve learned from working with Joey:
-    Write out an org chart for where you expect to be in the next year.
-    Rent an office space large enough to accommodate this org chart.
-    Keep a minimum of three months operating costs in a separate bank account.
-    When interviewing potential employees, look for those who ask “vision questions” rather than “how much” questions.
-    Speaking of employees, most of the time, young and hungry trumps experienced and set-in-their-ways.
-    Keep a running spreadsheet of your projected sales, labor costs and monthly operating expenses. Organize it by month. At the end of each quarter, plug in your actuals, and adjust your budgeting accordingly.
- It might take an hour to write out a process for an action that could take you five minutes to complete. But that hour you spend documenting a process will be your LAST hour working on the task (vs. a lifetime of five minutes).

Yesterday, Joey told us about a few things he’s been doing at his own business—things we hope to do someday soon:
-    Time blocking: Schedule one day (or one morning) a week to work on your business.
-    If, as a business owner, you’re not taking at least as much vacation time as you’d get working for someone else, it’s time to re-evaluate.
-    Even better, decide how many vacation days you want to take this year, and block off the time. If your time is billable, figure out how much you need to increase your billable hours each week to make up for your time out of the office.
-    Make updating operations manuals part of your employee’s jobs. This applies to everything from documenting their daily processes to keeping their job descriptions up to date.

For a goldmine of more small business tips, check out Joey’s blog.

—Britta

Today was a content strategy marathon and I was Bill Rogers sans the nylon short-shorts. After the first hour of talking about content strategy, there is a palpable groove you find—an artistic prideful high of making sense out of silly string and tiddlywinks.

I was on the phone all day talking about content strategy with:

Jeff at Predicate—mega, wicked sharp content strategist.

Multiple Clients—who are just starting to understand the long tail of content marketing.

Blind calls—from organizations interested in content strategy

Business neighbors—wondering what it was we did again and do we always play post-rock-math-metal on Fridays so loud.

And then, off-topic—an NFL QB ventured into my office with a friend.

Just as there is artistry in painting/sculpture, so there is in mathematics, law and even content
strategy. Success is about intersections: art/business, operations/vision or strategy/content/design. The better you mashup the inputs, the better the output.

When I was younger, Warhol didn’t make sense. Then rent was due, and tuition was due and I began to see that art was everywhere and in everything. Once I applied that creative thinking to work, good things happened. The chalk line of business and creative has been washed away—the more integrated, the better.

“An artist is somebody who produces things that people don’t need to have but that he—for some reason—thinks it would be a good idea to give them. Business Art is a much better thing to be making that Art Art, because Art Art doesn’t support the space it takes up, whereas Business Art does. (If Business Art doesn’t support its own space it goes out of business.)”

Andy Warhol
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
1975

—Ian