Everyday I Write The Book

The hardest part about writing the book was the gap between the book I wanted to write and the book that the publisher wanted. This being my first book, I had no idea how the process worked. So I kept waiting for someone to say to me: Here's who the intended audience is. Here's how we're hoping to differentiate our book from other books and services that already provide this information. Here's the tone we want you take. Here are the questions we want you to answer.

In fact, no such discussion ever took place. My attempt at a face to face meeting with the editorial director was rebuffed. Here's what he said about my Chicago and Marvin Gaye samples...

I read your two samples and they look very good. I like the tone. I agree, however, that you should try to find a happy medium between the two. You want to be careful that you don't editorialize or hint at something like "yeah, they sold a lot of records but this band still kinda sucks." Basically, I think we both agree that Chicago has not produced anything remotely worth listening to in years but we probably should not inject that opinion into the piece.

From there, we went straight into selecting who was going to be in the book.

Now, a smart person would have read the editor's remarks and said, "Well, I guess I better tread lightly and stick to the facts." Instead I called the Eagles "macho shitheads." I had the bad manners to say that Dionne Warwick's later material had a tendency to lapse into schmaltz. I took Christina Aguilera to task for presenting herself in her press releases as one thing and presenting her music as something completely different. I thought these were valid observations to make about pop legends. Evidently not.

I was essentially told, ""Look, we're not writing that kind of book. No one cares what Derek Caney thinks about Christina Aguilera. Stop editorializing!" But no matter how many times I was told that, and I was told that a lot, I had a hard time hearing it. "Whose book was this anyway," I thought in my haughty self-righteous tone. The fact was it wasn't my book. And I stopped referring to it as such very early on. When talking about the "project" (ugh), I was careful to call it "the book I'm writing," not "my book." My book would have been very different than the one that's coming out.