Biographies have one thing in common: they are books about someone’s life, in full or in parts of particular interest, written by an author who is not the person whose life is the subject of the book.
As with most genres, biography encompasses a spectrum from superficial to in-depth. Great biographies are among the most popular books, by which I mean the most commercial and widely read.
I have read many biographies, because I find life narratives engrossing. I also enjoy reading epic historical fiction like War and Peace, in which biographies of Leo Tolstoy’s main characters — Napoleon in particular — drive the narrative action.
Recognizing the perils of incomplete list making, I’ll resist naming what I consider the best biographies written by illustrious contemporary authors, while adding this observation: Robert Caro’s multivolume biography of Lyndon Johnson is considered the pinnacle of research and writing. The enormous scale is worthy of the subject, although there cannot be many writers able or willing to devote decades to so massive an undertaking.
Caro’s commitment and methods reflect his genius of focus. It is also the case that his earlier biography, The Power Broker, about Robert Moses, who transformed New York through his infrastructure projects, has sold hundreds of thousands of copies since its publication in 1974, providing Caro with a steady royalty stream, which surely helped him finance his work on the LBJ volumes.
How to support yourself in tackling projects of this scale is an issue I’ll discuss in a later chapter in this series. (Hint: No advance will ever be enough.)
I have also read many short biographies over the years, often in series by distinguished writers, sweeping and yet digestible accounts of, for example, iconic figures like Napoleon, mythic figures like the Buddha, or presidents of the United States, including the lesser known but still significant occupants of the White House, like John Quincy Adams or James Garfield.
These books are often more engaging and informative than encyclopedic or textbook versions and are enhanced by the point of view and expertise of the authors. Insight can provide much of the satisfaction of vast detail when it is designed to do so.
The obvious place for an author to start in writing a biography is to select the person, living or dead, who will be the subject of the book. Preferably this person will be of sufficient stature to have amassed considerable source material about his or her life. Fame and celebrity need not be the only criteria. For example, biographies of persecuted minorities or lesser-known participants in great events are fascinating when there are diaries, journals, and letters to give texture to the tale.
Among those I published, my favorite biography was We All Got History: The Memory Books of Amos Webber by Nick Salvatore, a professor at Cornell. These were the annotated diaries of a Black man in Philadelphia, active in the Underground Railroad, who served in the Union army during the Civil War and later was an Odd Fellow. What I especially liked was Webber’s daily recording of the weather, which immersed the reader in his daily life and how his mood was affected by what was happening around him.
This is my main point about biographies:
All biographical material — whether original or secondary when interpreted — comes with a point of view from the person who created it. Letters, documents, and even photographs need to be assessed, considering the conditions under which they were produced. One twenty-first-century challenge is how easy it has become to adjust or falsify material that appears to be genuine.
A repeated bromide for nonfiction writers in all genres is always to check, consider, and reference your sources to the maximum extent.
The impact of artificial intelligence as a factor is a major new issue facing books and authors. Yet so was the printing press nearly six hundred years ago, as was the twentieth-century technology that made it possible to print and ship hundreds of thousands of books in a matter of hours. The continuing test is how to assess the closeness to the best possible truth that comes from assiduous research and clear writing.
Particularly important in writing about public figures of any kind is to examine the bona fides of the originator of the source material. Bibliographies in other books can provide the necessary citations, as do footnotes or endnotes or citations posted on an internet site created to accompany a book.
Ultimately, if a biography is to be credible, the sources of every fact and judgment need to withstand challenge, especially from critics who may perceive the subject in a different way from the biographer and may want to discredit the description.
An “authorized” biography, by its nature, will be assessed in a different way compared to those that have not been commissioned or approved by the subject. Another complication arising from writing a biography of a living person is that the writer may receive complaints from the person being described.
My sense is that biographers delving into historical figures will have more latitude to render their portraits in a way that will withstand challenges, compared to those who write the life stories of living subjects who are alert to their reputation.
Memoirs, as I have said in earlier chapters, have to be judged on an author’s merits and objectives. The same is true of biographies. My recommended approach is to highlight and acknowledge in the writing whatever is accurate and verifiable and what is not. Fiction is by its nature flexible when it comes to framing a reality. In nonfiction, while the realities are fact-based, they are still malleable as material emerges and perspectives change. They need to be deemed reliable.
Skepticism about sources or about the judgments of others are inevitable in a great many life stories. Even books that are considered definitive biographies when they are published will rarely become the last word.
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Jonathan Eig is in the top tier of biographers. He has written acclaimed biographies of the baseball great Lou Gehrig, the boxing icon Muhammad Ali, and the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., the last of which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2024.
Eig’s current project is a biography of George Soros, whom I have come to know well in having published every book by him since 1998. I also edited a book of essays about him, titled George Soros: A Life in Full, which was published after Soros turned ninety and said that he had no intention of writing a memoir of his own.
In my introduction to the volume of biographical essays, I wrote this:
“Depending on who or where you are, describing Soros is likely to elicit different answers. He has even more identities than he has lived decades, now into his tenth. In addition to survivor, billionaire, speculator, philanthropist, activist, author, nemesis of the far right, and global citizen, there is husband, father, and, to an extent he may not even realize, friend.”
I took advantage of our ongoing conversations to put questions to Eig about the writing of biography and, to the great benefit of this chapter, he sent me this in response:
“The essayist Joseph Epstein once wrote that biographical subjects are like snakes — best handled dead. I’ve always agreed. First of all, a biographer needs the distance of some time to assess his or her subject’s impact.
“Second of all, proximity might compromise objectivity. Muhammad Ali was still alive when I began my account of his life, but he was no longer capable of doing interviews. He wanted me to read him the book when I finished, a frightening prospect for me, because I wasn’t sure he’d like it. But it didn’t matter because he died before I finished. Of course, I still had to reckon with his family.
“With all my biographies (Ali, MLK, Gehrig), I had to worry about what the family would think. I tried to win their trust and gain their cooperation without giving up my independence. Sometimes family members or interview subjects want to be paid. I won’t do it. Sometimes they want to read the book before it’s finished. Won’t do it. Occasionally, they’ll ask to review the quotes I intend to use before publication. I will submit to them the quotes to be checked for accuracy. But if our interviews were on the record, they don’t get to change what they said. If they ask for the interviews to be off the record, I honor that and won’t quote them, but I might go back to them later and ask them for permission to use something they said and to make it on the record. MLK’s children never got on board. They declined to be interviewed.
“All of this is to say that it’s always a bit of a dance, whether the subject is dead or alive. But now that I’m writing about a subject who’s alive and sitting for interviews (George Soros), I can tell you that it’s a very different experience — easier in some ways and more difficult in others. The most obvious way that it’s easier is that I can ask my subject questions: What do you think is the theme of your life? Why did you choose that college? How did your father treat your mother? What’s your biggest regret? Who’s that standing next to you in this photo? Will you tell your friends that it’s OK with you if I interview them?
“I won’t give Soros or any other subject permission to read or comment on my book in advance. I will write what I want. But there’s still the risk (also true with dead subjects, but not as big a factor) that I might develop a fondness or a revulsion with my subject based on personal chemistry that might influence the tone and shape of my book.
“There’s also a risk that access to my subject might make me lazy, might make me inclined to do less archival research, or might tempt me to accept my subject’s answers without conducting my own thorough study.
“Also, might my book be more generous toward my subject if he invites me to stay for lunch after an interview, or might it be more critical because he doesn’t invite me to lunch? Am I going to pull punches because I’ve developed a rapport and I’m worried about his reaction when he reads the book? I hope not, but we’re all human.
“At the bottom line, biography is an exercise in failure. One person can never truly know another. It’s an act of hubris to tell another’s story. It’s also an act of empathy, a form of art, and a vital part of historical storytelling. So, one does one’s best. My goal is to fail as little as possible, to be honest about what I know and don’t know, and to win the reader’s trust.”
For readers with certain interests, there has been a great deal this year to absorb.
Voluminous documents related to the Justice Department’s investigation of the late Jeffrey Epstein were finally released. Then came Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s blockbuster book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. Now there is the publication of another book, American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump by Kai Bird with Susan Goldmark.
These portraits of the whys and wherefores among a prominent sector of Americans are illuminating in their description of power perversions and social corruptions. There are a great many famous names, but one in particular resounds, that of Donald Trump.
The friendship between Roy Cohn and Donald Trump started in the 1970s, as the lawyer mentored the young real estate developer in behavior and tactics that went on to frame Trump’s persona long after Cohn’s death from AIDS forty years ago and have proved to be so important in his defiant approach to the presidency.
In the Epstein files, Trump appears often in lecherous photos and as a player in the saga of Epstein’s escapades. To determine how many people from Cohn’s cohort are mentioned in the Epstein files would require an Artificial Intelligence probe I am not prepared to undertake. (Somebody should, however.)
Of that group Trump is certainly the most recognizable.
There is a great deal of licit and illicit sex in the narratives of Cohn and Epstein. Cohn was a gay man who refused to be publicly identified as such but was active, especially with young men. Epstein’s preference, for which he was convicted of a felony, was underage girls.
Trump has had to pay the writer E. Jean Carroll $5.625 million (including interest), a judgment rendered by a jury in a civil trial for defamation and sexual abuse. A jury verdict in another case awarded Carroll an additional $83.3 million. The first judgment was upheld by the Supreme Court; Trump has posted a bond for the second verdict and is appealing.
But by comparison to Cohn and Epstein, Trump’s involvement with sex has been less central to his life story. He is, after all, the world’s most powerful man, elected twice to the presidency of the United States.
The common thread among the three men is how enmeshed they became in elite circles in New York, Washington, Palm Beach, Cambridge, and high-end resort communities in New England and Long Island.
In the 1950s, while still in his twenties, Roy Cohn was a pivotal aide to Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin Republican whose anti-communist crusade symbolized an era of persecution of anyone whose “leftist” sympathies could be portrayed as a threat to national security.
That took place seventy-five years ago. Trump’s MAGA drive against “woke” or “diversity, equity, and inclusion” policies has the same tone as McCarthy’s and even includes tirades against “socialism” and accusations of communism.
While Trump as president has been a looming factor in American life for a decade now, his earliest engagement with Cohn and those personal and political strategies took place a half-century ago.
My takeaway from all of this year’s reading material is the interplay between formidable public figures — Larry Summers, a former president of Harvard and secretary of the treasury, and Bill Gates and many more — who wined and dined with Epstein and the resemblance to the Hollywood stars, among others, who under scrutiny “named names” in the McCarthy era.
As a New York power broker, Cohn exerted a corrupt reach into the judiciary and politics, which was by modern standards generally sub rosa, outside the risks of revelation.
The tech moguls and finance billionaires who have so publicly solicited Trump’s approval seem to have a different motive from those who supported McCarthy’s Red Scare and those who abetted Epstein’s salacious lifestyle.
Today the associations are mainly about money, because Trump wields power over enormous government contracts and favors.
In assessing why so many people of note have been drawn to Cohn, Epstein, and Trump over the years, something has to be said about their personalities. Fortunately for me, I never came close to encountering Epstein.
But I did have a dinner with Roy Cohn at the New York restaurant “21” in 1984, when he was considering writing an autobiography to be published by Random House (which we did not publish in the end), and I did get a close-up view of Trump in the late 1980s, when he was publishing his books at Random House.
Cohn’s reputation was already sleazy, but over a meal he was chatty and good-natured. He even gave me a lift to my apartment in his limo. And my interaction with Trump was fascinating but he was then a colorful and flamboyant real estate developer; the notion that he might one day be president of the United States was inconceivable.
As a book editor and by instinct mainly an observer in whatever scene I find myself in, it never occurred to me to imagine a friendship with either man, so I’m left with this question: Why did so many people of accomplishment and stature get drawn into the Cohn-Epstein-Trump orbit?
I did not get an answer in all the pages I read. In sum, these are a portrait of modern-day bacchanalia. And we all know what eventually happened to ancient Rome.
Q
People who achieve fame of one sort or another often choose to write memoirs — as a commemoration of themselves; to claim or reclaim their life story; as a justification for their activities; or, in the case of politicians, to address constituencies directly or to justify their record.
Celebrity memoirs can also be lucrative. I have objected, without much impact, to the notion of political figures (Supreme Court justices or U.S. senators, for example) cashing in on their public roles while still serving in them.
Nonetheless, the list of celebrity memoirs I have published is lengthy and, in retrospect — even to me — astonishing in its range of notables. I shared many of those experiences in An Especially Good View, and so I will not recount them in detail here.
What I’ve learned from managing all those celebrities through the life stories they want to share may be useful for working with them. As an editor, you’ll need to develop a relationship of trust and authority. As a ghostwriter or collaborator, you’ll need to sublimate your ego. And if you are famous enough to deserve a memoir, it’s best to avoid excesses of self-congratulation.
I have always measured memoirs of any kind by their verisimilitude, “the appearance of being true or real.” Memoirists are entitled to render their account as they choose. The reader is equally entitled to believe that version, or not.
Celebrity memoirs that attract large publisher advances need to justify those dollar figures with revelations, personal or professional, that will attract readers and perhaps some controversy. My goal as the editor was to enable the author (and often the collaborator that was hired) to craft a story that would answer the questions that were on readers’ minds: Who are you, really? How did you get to be so famous? and What do you want me to know about you that will justify reading this book?
Here are examples from two particularly famous celebrity authors. In each case, I was the person at Random House primarily responsible for the book’s content and publication.
First is Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal. Published in 1987, the book was a sensation. It sold one million copies in the first three months and was a #1 bestseller in the United States and in the United Kingdom. Unquestionably the book raised the profile of a flamboyant New York real estate developer, the boost in fame that led him decades later to the presidency.
The coauthor of the book was Tony Schwartz, who had pitched the idea and the title that has entered the language as a caption of Trump’s life. Schwartz has publicly regretted his work on the book. The accepted view is that not only did Trump not write the book, but it essentially presented a false narrative of himself.
I disagree. In fact, Schwartz shaped Trump’s words, which he overheard or extracted, into coherence with flair. Reading the book so many years later, I found that the Trump in the White House is very much the grandiose and aggressive younger man in the book, writ large. Everything about him then is still what he is as president, on a vastly different scale.
Pundits, politicians, and historians grappling to explain Trump should definitely begin with and take seriously The Art of the Deal.
My second example is Counsel to the President by Clark Clifford with Richard Holbrooke, which was published in 1991. Clifford was considered the epitome of a Washington wise man. His public career as counselor to presidents and esteemed adviser to the powerful and glamorous made his book worthy of the front cover of the New York Times Book Review and bestseller status.
Except that it was not a representation of Clifford’s life that emerged after the book was published.
In July 1992, Clifford was indicted on federal and state charges related to his role in the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, which used fraud and bribery to take control of First American Bankshares in Washington. Clifford had served as the bank’s chairman.
Because of his age he never went to trial. But he acknowledged that his predicament had become the choice of “either being stupid or venal.” On reflection, I realized that the book excluded most of Clifford’s work over the years as a power broker and effectively a lobbyist.
The indictment buried the book. And Clifford’s long-term reputation never recovered. I did not ask Holbrooke, Clifford’s coauthor, whom I knew well, why he had not found a way to accurately portray how Clifford had earned the stature he achieved. The book was not dishonest, but it was a failure of verisimilitude.
Memoirs by famous people usually carry a question that the public will want to have answered. Here are two examples of how the expert collaborator Bill Novak (with whom I published five books) and I handled them.
When Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill’s memoir was announced in 1985 — Random House had paid $1 million for the rights — the cynical question being asked by politicos and reporters was “How much will Tip say about JFK and women?” The rumors about President John F. Kennedy having strayed from his marriage, widely and often, were still mesmerizing the public, two decades after his death. The fact that O’Neill was an ultimate insider in Boston political lore was seen as a titillating measure of the book’s candor.
Tip made clear that he did not intend to share whatever he knew. “After all,” he said privately, “the widow and his children are alive.” Novak and I devised this sentence with Tip: “In recent years there have been plenty of stories about Jack’s fondness for women, both before and during the White House years, but I don’t want to get into that.”
Because the book, Man of the House, was so otherwise rich in Tip’s wisdom and wit, the issue of JFK’s private activities never came up. It was a major bestselling success.
When Nancy Reagan was writing her memoir, called My Turn, the question being asked was how she would characterize “Ronnie,” as she called him, whose seeming affability masked an aloofness and indifference toward many of the people he dealt with, including his family and many of his own appointees.
The wording Nancy accepted, after spending many hours with us discussing the matter, was: “Although he loves people, he often seems remote, and he doesn’t let anyone get too close. There’s a wall around him. He lets me come closer than anyone else, but there are times when even I feel that barrier. . . . Ronnie is an affable and gregarious man who enjoys other people, but unlike most of us, he doesn’t need them for companionship or approval.” This was an essential insight, with words that reflected her view, even if it was not as pithy a passage as she would have devised on her own.
The worst thing that can happen to a celebrity memoir is when the author disavows the book’s controversial content by saying that the words were the ghostwriter’s and not actually theirs. This renders the book dead on arrival. In a memoir, the author must be ready and willing to defend what he or she says in print.
Among all the memoirs I published, the most important was Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father. He wrote it completely by himself as a young man, a recent graduate of Harvard Law School and an aspiring politician. The book was published in 1995. Almost a decade later, Obama’s keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention was hailed for its eloquence and elevated him to national prominence. The book then sold millions of copies and came to be considered a classic.
That young man’s book, the story before he became famous, resonated so strongly because of the quality of the writing and the verisimilitude of the story it told.
Is there a difference between books classified as memoirs and those called autobiographies? They have the same purpose and are essentially the same genre. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank is said to be largest-selling modern autobiography because it was written as she lived it and was not therefore a memoir.
Memoir, generally, seems a more casual term than autobiography, which suggests factual precision, a detailed history of a person’s experiences rather than reflections on them.
Whatever they are called, they are life stories. Everyone has one to tell, and I believe they are worth telling in one form or another.
Lives are finite. A memoir, written and preserved, is everlasting.
Amazon’s data center on the outskirts of New Carlisle, Indiana, is already one of the largest in the United States and is still expanding. The townspeople have so far absorbed this profound transformation of what had been 1,200 acres of farmland.
Then lawyers for an enterprise called Western Hospitality Partners showed up. Despite the company’s reassuring name, WHP is identified online as a developer that focuses on data centers. The lawyers said that WHP intended to purchase 1,300 acres of farmland on the other side of New Carlisle from Amazon’s data center to construct a large data center for a client whose identity was not disclosed.
In March, the bipartisan town and county councils voted to deny zoning approval for the project. But I’ve been told that the lawyers, in their “suits and gold watches,” can still come back and reapply on behalf of the seller. Holding out against a willing seller of the land, farmers who have been in the area for generations, will not be easy.
Robert Bryce, who publishes a widely read Substack on energy issues, reports that since January 1, 2026, he has tracked 275 bans, rejections, restrictions, or moratoriums on data centers across the country. Bryce compares the backlash to what he has seen in opposition to “Big Solar and Big Wind.”
“The simple truth,” he writes, is that people “all across the US and around the world are fighting data centers because these projects are not providing sufficient value to their communities.”
That is his conclusion, as an expert. But based on my experience in New Carlisle, this is not the full story. As I wrote last year, New Carlisle’s experience has been that Amazon has dealt with the community with sufficient care to minimize the disruption of a major industrial development by showing interest in the town’s welfare.
And this has continued. Amazon has provided funding for a STEM program at the local high school, and the company supports community events at Christmas and Hometown Days during the summer. A community relations representative from Amazon has been working with the town to ensure that a cooperative spirit is maintained.
In my conversations with town leaders, they have told me that they recognize that to some extent this relationship is a tradeoff. Given the county’s interest in economic development, the right approach, they say, is to make the best of the new reality.
I chose not to try to contact Western Hospitality Partners for its version of its intention to build a data center, because the issue seemed to be moot. After the rejection by St. Joseph County, where New Carlisle is located, the company pivoted to a site in South Bend, which was already zoned for industrialization, according to the South Bend Tribune.
What made the New Carlisle people so determined to block the plan was the tone of the approach. Whom were the lawyers actually representing? Town officials told me they didn’t know. They said the looming scale of the project clearly threatened New Carlisle’s environment, the town’s proud culture, and its living standards.
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Artificial Intelligence is a very big deal by all accounts, with trillions of dollars being invested. AI is definitely an innovation comparable to electricity, automobiles, aviation, and telephones more than a century ago, and to the internet in the last fifty years.
What remains to be demonstrated is what it means for the people of New Carlisle. This summer’s Hometown Days had its traditional features: the parade down the town’s main street with the high school band, cheerleaders, and floats; the food fair in the town’s park; and a Wiffle Ball competition that attracted competitors from a distance.
The vibe in this corner of the Midwest, northern Indiana and Southwest Michigan, seems remote from the political and economic freneticism elsewhere in the country, in Washington, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and as far away at the Strait of Hormuz.
Michigan’s Democratic senatorial primary was portrayed as a major contest between the progressives, represented by the narrow winner, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, and the “establishment” candidate, Representative Haley Stevens. (Having watched the televised debate between the candidates, El-Sayed was more glamorous than Stevens, who tended to glower; that may have had something to do with the outcome.)
No doubt the United States has deep divisions along ideological lines, and media coverage of issues like the Iran war, support for Israel, the botched work on the Reflecting Pool, and the tirades coming from President Donald Trump are unavoidable.
But what I have particularly admired in the spirit of New Carlisle and the other small towns and cities in the region this summer are their time-honored summer routines and their determination to make the best of the inevitability of challenges and changes to their way of life.
So, for now, there will only be one big data center on the outskirts of New Carlisle, because the people who live there, through their elected representatives from both political parties, want to keep it that way. Grass roots democracy is still very much worth the effort of speaking out and casting your vote.
The next chapters in this series will describe the nonfiction categories I know best: memoir, biography, history, and books based on original reporting and journalism.
A logical place to start with writing books is memoir. Why? Because of all the nonfiction genres, it is far and away the most common. The only requirement is that it is a book written by you, about you, your recollections, what material you can amass to support your story, and your willingness to write knowing that you may reveal things that only those closest to you already know.
Every life story has an arc. Whatever your arc has been, there comes a point when an instinct or an encouragement to record your experiences becomes appealing.
I almost always urge writing a memoir, recognizing the challenges and limitations to be encountered. A memoir is a version of your life, as portrayed as only you can.
In setting up the framing for my own memoir, An Especially Good View: Watching History Happen (published in 2021), I wrote this:
“As an editor and publisher, I have encountered memoirs of all kinds — bracing, illuminating, mean, kind, boring, revelatory. I have published the memoirs of some of the most famous people in the world: presidents of the United States and Russia, first ladies, those responsible for waging war and peace, billionaire philanthropists, advisers to the high and mighty, political prisoners, celebrated athletes, and journalists of every sort. I have encountered authors who were too self-deprecating and others who were comically self-aggrandizing.
“I know from memoirs.”
I started considering a memoir years before it was published. I approached the topic as a reporter, which is what I am and always have been by instinct and curiosity. I went back through my own life, compiling as much detail as I could, chronologically and in themes: background, growing up, education, and the evolution of my career as a journalist and then in book publishing. I also wrote about family, community, and a chapter I called “Wrinkles,” in which I reflected on the inevitable aspects of life that are, in one way or another, complicated.
What was surprising and in its way exciting was to discover how much I was learning that I either had not known or had not explored beyond surface, family legends rather than the precise details. My parents, Marta and Jozef (in the U.S. they were Martha and Joseph) were Polish, Jewish, and from well-to-do, well-educated families — and, in my mother’s case, one that was somewhat celebrated.
A majority of American Jews, I had found over the years, tended to assume that they are descended from the parts of Russia and Eastern Europe known as the “Pale of Settlement,” where Jews lived mainly in villages and smaller cities and practiced simple trades. In historical terms, they seemed mostly similar and, to their American descendants, not terribly interesting. (This is a generalization. There were exceptions of course, but not a great deal of exploration in most cases, I believed.)
In this period, when violent pogroms and antisemitism reached a peak, millions of Jews managed to make their way to the United States. Their descendants told the stories from the time of their family’s arrival as immigrants. An upward trajectory in American society was the norm.
This was not the case for me, and with the help of genealogists and several relatives who had embarked on a similar quest, I traced my family back to the 1740s. For example, I found out where my family name, Osnos, came from — it is an Old Testament name derived from Asenat, the wife of the prophet Joseph. This was a revelation that enabled me to understand that other families had versions of the same name (Osnes, Osnoss) but were not related to us and may not even have been Jewish.
My mother’s family was exceptionally colorful, stretching across a spectrum from the founder of the French automobile company Citroen to friendship with the Bolshevik leader V. I. Lenin in Zurich. A very gifted Polish cousin, Joanna Olczak-Ronikier, wrote In the Garden of Memory, a brilliant family portrait that became a classic in Poland (I eventually decided to publish it in the U.S.), which was invaluable in providing historical background.
Most important, I was able to explore the story of how my parents managed to leave Poland after the Nazi invasion of 1939 and eventually make it to India, where I was born, and then to the United States. I was four months old and in a basket when they arrived, so I grew up almost entirely in a country that my parents had come to in their late thirties.
I had only known the outlines of that story and had never really made the effort to learn more because my parents, my brother, and I were focused on our lives as they unfolded in the U.S., rather than what had come before.
In some respects, I learned that as close as we were, with the same DNA, we were a family with two different life-framing experiences that I was finally uncovering and the differences that resulted.
My first reader, Lisa Kaufman, a former editorial colleague and friend, told me that the manuscript was anecdotal, by which she meant shallow, when context and judgment were required. I sent the manuscript to a literary agent who had asked to see it, and her dismissive (I thought) opinion was that the book was meant for “family and friends,” and not to be widely read.
This is a frequent trope about memoirs, suggesting that the only people who would care enough to read it already know who you are. And yes, that is a core audience for any memoir. But deeper examination of any life story can unearth detail and emotions that make a difference in depth and potential interest.
I wrote additional drafts, adding as much detail as I could to expand the book’s substance. I would write these drafts in notebooks, with a pen, which felt less intimidating than to do so on a computer — and more personal than they would become on my laptop.
I then sent the manuscript to Paul Golob, another former colleague, whom I acknowledged in the book as having “extraordinary editorial finesse.” He gave the manuscript a thorough going-over, urging more of some things and less of others. Ultimately, I devised a way to publish the memoir, making it available for sale through an imprint my wife and I established called Platform Books LLC.
There are many more ways to distribute books now than is generally understood, and I will explain them later when I describe the publishing phase of the book process.
I made rules of my own: Be especially careful in describing people in the book who will eventually read it. Something as small as a typo in a name can be offensive to the person so misrepresented. Lists of people are tricky because only the people who might have been left off will really care. And, in my case, I avoided vengeance, settling old scores (even where it might have been deserved), by blurring the identifiers of my wrongdoers.
Satisfying as retribution can be, it too often veers into pettiness.
As to describing people’s personal attributes, I learned a lesson when I published a book by Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts called Speaking Frankly. I suggested that he describe the kind of people in the constituency that elected him, and he refused, telling me that few people are comfortable being portrayed in clichés about their class or appearance.
In describing other people, it’s often best to recognize that there are ways of writing that can satisfactorily make your point without overwhelming the story or being elusive, as long as they are, in your own perspective, honest.
I chose not to say things about living people that they did not already know about themselves.
And finally, I solicited a sensitivity read from a younger editor, a woman, recognizing that my terminologies may have become outdated. Terms like “girlish” or “pretty” have a different aura in the twenty-first century than they had in the past, and may seem demeaning rather than descriptive.
Fashion and style in language evolve, and what might once have been acceptable can become offensive.
I often recommend taking notes or keeping a journal, not necessarily for a memoir but because, with the precipitous decline of actual letter writing, preserving experiences for the future is a form of legacy. Consider how much of what we know about history comes from correspondence and diaries. I don’t think email will be anywhere as memorable.
Any self-examination carries the responsibility to be as completely honest as possible, realizing the risks entailed from revealing things that have previously remained private.
In the years since writing my memoir, and as a result of having done it, my understanding of character and temperament, including my own, has continued to develop and deepen. My sense is that this is often the case with those who write memoirs.
A memoir is a legacy rendered on your terms.
A reality that had been developing for years has become viral in the aftermath of the events of October 7, 2023, when the Palestinian militant group Hamas massacred 1,200 Israelis, precipitating a war in which tens of thousands of people in Gaza died and the territory was almost completely destroyed.
Israel, the nation established after the Holocaust, settled by remnants of the Jewish populations from Europe and, later, by Jews expelled from the Arab countries and immigrants from the Soviet Union and the United States, has achieved a reputation so contentious that it has become a toxic topic whenever and wherever it is encountered.
For decades, efforts to reconcile the policies and objectives pursued by the Israelis and the Palestinians have led inexorably to failure. Is it possible to find a reasonable way forward?
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It seems that every ethnic group, nationality, race, religion, and gender identity can claim to have suffered periods of harassment, bigotry, violence, and repression. But the Jews have experienced an especially well-defined history of antisemitism, culminating in the twentieth century with Adolf Hitler’s determination to eliminate them altogether, wherever they lived. In 1939, a majority of the global Jewish population, roughly 9.5 million people, lived in Europe. By 1945, that number had dropped to 3.8 million, after the systematic annihilation across Europe that came to be known as the Holocaust.
In 1948, the State of Israel was established in a region where Jews had historically lived until they were defeated and nearly all of them dispersed by the Romans almost two thousand years ago. Over the centuries, the population of the region became primarily Arab, Muslims and Christian.
Before World War I, the Ottoman Empire ruled this land, and following the war Palestine came under a British mandate from the League of Nations. A minority Jewish population had made its way to Palestine over time, but the numbers were soon restricted by Britain’s policy of tightly limiting Jewish emigration where Arabs were in the majority.
After Hitler took power in 1933 and demonized Jews as part of official state policy, hundreds of thousands of Jews tried to leave or were expelled from Germany and, later, Austria. But no country was willing to take them in any numbers, including the United States.
In the mid-1930s, confronted with Arab revolts against the British, a royal commission concluded that the mandate would have to end and proposed a division of Palestine into an Arab-led country with a separate space and administration for Jews living there. A similar formula was adopted by the United Nations in November 1947, when Resolution 181 established two states, one Arab and one Jewish, in the land that the British would soon vacate. The Jewish population of Palestine accepted the partition plan, and Israel became a state on May 14, 1948. The United States immediately recognized Israel’s independence, followed three days later by the Soviet Union, but the Arab world unanimously rejected the new state and any Jewish political presence in the Middle East. Five Arab nations declared war on Israel.
In the chaos that followed, about 750,000 people, about half of the Palestinians living in the territory of the British Mandate, were displaced, an event known in Arabic as the Nakba. This in turn ingrained enmities that to this day define Israeli-Palestinian relations, leading to violence that has had a profound impact there, along with consequences far from the land itself.
In 1967, following another major regional war, Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, bringing millions of Palestinians directly under Israeli military rule and opening the door to Israeli settlements. Since then, recurring surges of violence, including Intifada uprisings and terrorism, were offset by what at the time seemed to be diplomatic breakthroughs. The Camp David Accords, the Oslo Accords, and Israel’s peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan raised hopes that a general settlement of the abiding disputes was possible. None have achieved this goal.
In this summer of 2026, there no longer seems to be any meaningful momentum toward an agreement that could or would change the corrosive dynamics between Israel and the Palestinians.
So, what might actually make a difference in which the indisputable interests of the Israeli and Palestinian people take precedence over rhetoric and polemic?
New Leadership: The Camp David Accords were negotiated in 1978 by President Jimmy Carter with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat (who was assassinated three years later) and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, whose background in anti-British militancy and prominent position in the right wing of Israeli politics gave him the leeway to make peace with Israel’s most formidable enemy.
King Hussein of Jordan was pragmatic enough to make peace in 1994 with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated by an Israeli right-winger a year later.
By contrast, Egypt’s current authoritarian president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, is a former military chief with no apparent urge to be a legendary peacemaker, as Sadat wanted to be.
The Palestinian administration on the West Bank, itself established as a result of the Oslo Accords, is now led by Mahmoud Abbas, who is too compromised and sclerotic to make history at this point. And Hamas (and its affiliates in the region) are battered but still refuse to concede defeat and agree to any form of disarmament.
Israel has been led for years by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has shifted the country’s government to the far right, supporting significant encroachments on Palestinian land by Israeli settlers in the West Bank. And since the 2023 Hamas attacks, the Israel Defense Forces have virtually destroyed Gaza, where about two million Palestinians live.
An upcoming Israeli election on October 27 might wrest power from Netanyahu and the far right because their dominance is less reflective of Israeli public opinion than their policies make it appear. (As a comparison, think of the Trump presidency and how much of the American electorate it really represents.) Deciphering the intricacies of Israeli politics beyond Netanyahu demands expertise that I do not have. In The New Yorker’s August 3 issue, the editor David Remnick, deploying exhaustive depth and knowledge, identifies Gadi Eisenkot, a retired chief of the Israel Defense Forces as having “the best chance of unseating” Netanyahu in the election. A paywall limits access to the piece to subscribers, but that is its main takeaway.
President Donald Trump’s engagement in the region has veered from dealmaking that provides financial benefit to his political allies and his own family to waging war against Iran in a complicated alliance with Netanyahu. In classic Trump style, his Board of Peace is more grandiose than meaningful.
Pecuniary Peace: In the first Trump term, the Abraham Accords normalized relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco, with the expectation that the benefits of trade and commerce might deliver peace and prosperity to all sides.
Whatever else the Abraham Accords may have achieved, they showed that the prospect of financial and economic benefits to the parties could overcome ideological and religious divisions. Or, as Trump would argue, it demonstrated “The Art of the Deal.”
But the subsequent wars in Gaza, Iran, and southern Lebanon have undermined a trajectory of security that would be based on the traditional Middle Eastern interest in the making of money.
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The road to reason has become as rocky as the path to peace because of the scale of vituperation and violence. Can new leadership or lucrative trade actually make headway? Clearly, the current strategies are making matters worse.
On behalf of those of us with Jewish heritage I’d like to make this point: Out of the horrors of World War II, millions of Jews around the world, especially in the United States, earned a largely safe place in the societies where they lived and were accepted in ways they never really were before. How Jews have felt about Israel was always a consideration for them, with varying degrees of connection, depending on multiple aspects of family history, their experience in the United States, and the complexities of decades of religious intermarriage. In today’s circumstances, with Israel an unequivocal warrior state accused of war crimes and persecutions, discussion about Israel and Palestine invariably involves expletives and excoriation.
History has shown that while patterns persist, they can change. There were times in recent decades when that seemed possible in Israel and Palestine.
The first step toward reason is to recover our senses and recognize that outright victory for either of the antagonists would mean unfathomable suffering for peoples and a region that have already suffered far more than enough.
The essential point for all aspiring book writers to remember is that writing itself has no rules or guaranteed formulas. The only way for it to happen is by putting words together until they take form into sentences, paragraphs, and pages.
This is less obvious than it sounds.
As a publisher and now a demonstrably available adviser, I am often approached by would-be book writers who have set conditions for themselves before they plunge in fully. “I’ll write a proposal and see if I can get an agent,” is one version. This is a trap — and, at some level, a stall or an excuse.
If you have an idea, a vision, an instinct, or an urge, the best thing to do is to accept the prompt and start to write. If you set an objective and limit the excuses (for example, not starting because you need some initial validation from friends, family, agents, publishers, or other writers), you will recognize that there is nothing to lose by just forging ahead.
The water may be turbulent, but you need to jump in to find out. There is no reason to avoid those first tentative, uncertain, insecure emotions.
Years ago, I had a revelation when I encountered a prominent journalist I admired, who confessed: “Every time I put a piece of paper into the typewriter, I say, ‘Oh no, this time they will find me out.’”
This is known as the “imposter syndrome.” It is routine and in its way a reminder not to underestimate the effort necessary to write. My related version of this insight is to realize that if I consider something I have written to be as good as it can be, that is almost certainly not the case.
Nonfiction writing is an extremely broad category that includes just about everything that has a basis in facts, from silly to solemn, from the trivial to the magisterial. Anyone can write nonfiction, just as anyone can draw a picture. There has to be a place to start, the initial foray in which every writer is equal.
If your objective is to write a book, the place to start is to ask yourself, “What is this book about?” Try to summarize its intent in a possible title and a few summary paragraphs. This is the writer’s equivalent of an “elevator pitch.” The pitch by no means guarantees what the book will actually become. But it will help you focus. Staring at a blank page without knowing what you intend to say is a significant obstacle.
Books are defined by genre, “a category of composition.” My experience is mainly in memoirs, autobiographies (there is a difference), biographies, histories, reporting, investigation, and essays. Joan Didion’s books were combinations of memoir, reporting, and essays. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was investigative and revelatory about the environment. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s All the President’s Men described an investigation into the Watergate affair that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation as president. It was also their memoir of the experience.
Writers like David McCullough, Ron Chernow, and Doris Kearns Goodwin have published immersive bestselling biographies that combine the consummate detail of the best historians with narrative momentum and accessibility.
Journalists generally investigate current or recent events and interpret the news, politics, wars, business, celebrity, sports, all of which provide endless material. And most of these subjects evolve over time. So, when writing about a subject and wondering whether it will remain topical, it helps to remember that it can be placed into the context of the time and still make sense.
One of the most venerable topics is scandal. Scandals are enticing because something or someone is getting comeuppance. Many years ago, I was publishing a book called Scandal, about Washington. The author thought we were taking too long to get it from manuscript to sale. She was concerned that there would be no more scandals. I assured her that there will always be scandals.
In fact, over the years since the book was published, in the early 1990s, the pace of scandals has quickened almost to a frenzy.
The author and I have laughed about her fret ever since.
While every writer will eventually devise a strategy of how best to get the words written, it is worth taking the time to develop a strategy based on the experience of others. Brian Lamb, the estimable founder of C-SPAN, hosted a Sunday night program for many years called Booknotes, in which he would interview authors of nonfiction for an uninterrupted hour and would query his guests about their writing process. I found it fascinating and instructive.
Is the room well-lit or subdued to avoid distraction? Should phones be put in a locked drawer? Does it make sense to take a break every hour? One of my writer friends would stay at work until a thousand words were written, ready for revision the next morning before setting out for the next thousand.
Carl Sandburg, the great poet and biographer of Abraham Lincoln, lived for years in southwest Michigan, where his wife raised goats. When the weather permitted, he would write outside in the nude. Whatever works.
Everyone can write, but technique and talent are the key components. Talent is usually inherent, but it can be developed and honed through commitment and acquired confidence. Greatness often reflects decades of very hard work.
Over many years, I have devised a strategy for myself of drafting on paper the point I intend to make and then assembling the material I need to fulfill the objective. If I don’t know where I’m going, I’m unlikely to get there.
On the other hand, ideas can take form or adjust shape as they are expressed. Like sculpture, writing can be molded once the basic ingredients are gathered.
The historian and journalist Rick Atkinson, whose multivolume histories of World War II and the American revolution have been blockbusters, described in a C-SPAN interview his prodigious outlining process: he amasses and organizes thousands of facts and references that in turn become the narrative. This makes the writing process much more efficient, he says.
Technique is also what drafts are about. A “rough” draft gets material to a starting line or beyond. I urge writers to separate in their minds the published outcome from the drafting. If your focus is on impressing an agent, securing a publisher, or basking in acclaim, you are adding pressure to the process that is both unhelpful and unrealistic.
The best way to write is to write for the explicit purpose (and initially the sole purpose) of putting what you have to say into a form where it can be read.
If you are among the hundreds of thousands of people who have read Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s new book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, or the millions more who have heard about the devastating and infallible portrait it presents, then an account of life in a corner of southwest Michigan may seem too remote from the center to be truly relevant. The fact is that most Americans’ lives are far removed from events in and around the White House. But they do have to deal with the consequences and the aftermath.
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Flag Day is a documentary about what the people of Three Oaks, a town in southwest Michigan’s Berrien County, call the “largest Flag Day celebration in the world.” A Wall Street Journal review of the film said it is a “literally . . . flag-waving” tribute to the “immensely pleasing nature of small-town pride.”
As it happens, I saw Flag Day in a screening at the Vickers Theatre in Three Oaks, a few miles from where my family gathers for vacation on Lake Michigan. Coming from Washington, D.C., I had to reconcile the spirit on display with Donald Trump’s expropriation of June 14 as his birthday and red-white-and-blue banners adorning a bloody UFC cage fight on the White House lawn.
Oh well.
The documentary captures the array of locals: farmers on tractors, bearded veterans and bikers, baton twirlers and bagpipers, Miss Three Oaks, the gay shopkeeper who emigrated from Peru, the all-Black “Soul Stompers” from nearby Michigan City, and the onlookers of all ages and sizes in well-worn beach chairs waving small flags of their own.
The continuity of the celebration was reassuring. But reflecting on it later, I was thinking of something else. Berrien County is actually a composite of multiple strands of America’s fabric, communities of ethnic, racial, and income disparity with varying political preferences. There are families who settled on farms in the mid-1800s and those known locally as FIPs (F*&^0$% Illinois People), who have bought up the multi-million-dollar architecturally designed homes along the lake.
My wife’s family, originally from Chicago, has come here for a century and now numbers about one hundred across four generations, most of whom arrive in early August for “Peak Week.” (I was admitted more than fifty years ago and have managed to hang on.)
Much about Berrien County is enduring. Lake Michigan is forever spectacular, with water rising and falling a bit each year, as it has for millennia. The public beach in New Buffalo and the adjoining marina have been recognized as one of the country’s best inland resort destinations. The lines around Oink’s, the main ice cream parlor in “New Buff,” never seem to diminish the excitement of choosing from dozens of flavors.
Camp Sokol on the lake is one of the last remaining collection of cabins and shared facilities that draw families with Slavic and Baltic ancestry who came to Chicago long ago but still recognize their originating identities.
On the whole, the economic, political, and social spectrum of Berrien County reflects American norms. The median family income of about $65,000 is in line with the national number, spanning from hardscrabble farming and urban stresses in the small city of Benton Harbor to the waterfront wealth. On the Zillow real estate site, the top price for a home on the water is $9.975 million.
In 2024, Donald Trump won 53 percent of the vote in Berrien County, but my guess is that many of the FIP voters might have reduced that margin. This is an election year in Michigan, with the contests for governor, senator, the House, and state legislators mostly close enough to be of national interest. Primaries are August 4.
The additions in recent years of cannabis outlets, breweries, wineries, and the Pokagon tribe’s Four Winds Casino have doubtless added to county revenues and recreational choices. As elsewhere, there are local disputes over the impact of short-term rentals and the looming possibility of AI data centers, which have so far been held off.
As in most parts of the country, there are those in the county with less than they need, and that is where the impact of what is happening in Washington probably matters most.
Benton Harbor is a small majority-Black city in Berrien County that has an ingrained history of troubles that continue to defy improvement. Here is what I wrote about the school system, where virtual teachers are replacing the ones in classrooms. In less than a year, the latest superintendent has resigned, after clashes with the school board and students, adding to the sense of disarray.
Benton Harbor has a poverty rate of 40 percent, more than triple the national average, which means that deep funding cuts and tightened eligibility for SNAP, Medicaid, and other benefits will be especially felt there as they are take effect.
On the outskirts of Benton Harbor is La Perla, a grocery/restaurant hub for the local Hispanic community, which is about 5 percent of the county population. Virtually every product for sale comes from Mexico or Central America. You probably won’t get more authentic Mexican food anywhere else this side of the border. The walls are adorned with schedules for buses to destinations across Mexico. The only flags on display are Mexican.
A June report in the local Harbor Country News said that more than sixty people had been picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement this year after being held in the county jail under an agreement with the Sheriff’s Department.
At a town hall meeting about ICE, an attendee said (speaking through a translator), “Friends are scared to go to work, to go to restaurants to be out in public,” adding, “We just want to work.”
So, while the celebrations of “small town pride” in Berrien County resonate in this 250th year of the United States of America, for those who for one reason or another are aware of the depredations prevalent at the center of American power, the mood carries some shadows.
This is the first of a series that will run biweekly, intended to describe, explain, and unravel myths and mysteries about the process of writing a book — from vision to completion and the all-important means of reaching readers in today’s enormous array of options. The focus is nonfiction, because that is my background, but there should be useful insights about the process for writers of fiction also.
Books are ubiquitous and elusive. Everyone who can do so has read books, either by choice or obligation. Almost everyone with enough space has books on shelves. Books have been part of human life, as long as there have been people creating and reading them. Scrolls were followed by codex manuscripts, the format that still exists today, with pages to turn, alongside digital, audio, and a variety of graphic formats.
Books are resilient. If discarded, they can be replaced as long as the words or pictures have been saved.
Books are also elusive because the making of them, especially the writing, defies easy explanation or description. Every book is the property of a writer; while artificial intelligence programs can conjure book-length texts, their output is derived from words and ideas that originated with a person who has put them together.
There was a long-held belief that by putting a finger on almost any address in a phone book, you would encounter someone with a story about his or her life or experiences that is worth sharing. Phone books are no longer the popular registry they once were. But the principle remains that if prompted or motivated, every person can write a book.
This is why books are ubiquitous and why they are elusive. They are everywhere and as different from one another as each of us chooses to compose them.
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As an editor, publisher, and writer myself, I am regularly asked about how to write a book. My answer is that if you write one page a day for 365 days you will have a book. There is no such quip for what should be in the book and what to do with it once you have the pages in hand.
That is what this series is meant to be: a guide based on decades of experience in every aspect of the process, from inception to completion, one that reflects insights and wisdom from the scores of people I have worked with and learned from.
And here is a caveat. While from childhood I was an avid reader, my focus was almost always nonfiction. At the Saint Agnes branch of the New York Public Library in the 1950s, my favorites were Random House’s admirable Landmark history series, notable because the books were written by established authors in versions accessible to children on the brink of adolescence.
I have read fiction over the years but never felt qualified to edit novels or short stories, although I published a number of such books edited by colleagues of mine. And I have never tried to write from just my imagination.
Still, there is considerable overlap in how genres are published, publicized, and marketed, so to that extent there should be insights worth considering from my experience as a publisher. The mysteries of creating fiction are best explored and explained by the people who understand them far better than I do.
I am a journalist by background. I became a newspaper editor, a book editor, a publisher, an author, and then a publishing entrepreneur. I am not an academic, a scholar, an economist, or a philosopher. If I show a bias toward journalists as writers, that is because I have found that writing well for a general audience is challenging, and many specialists could do well by remembering that.
I will not presume to tell specialists how to become sufficiently expert to write books in their respective fields. But no matter who the writer is, every book starts with a blank page and then through stages toward the goal of reaching readers. What surprises me is how often I encounter writers of experience who do not understand the publishing process, which results in frustration, confusion, and disappointment.
Inevitably, there will be publishers, agents, editors, and booksellers who may disagree with my descriptions and prescriptions about how this process unfolds. By nature, such descriptions will always be in some measure a matter of considered opinion.
These, then, are mine.
The writing of a book is not inherently technical (like building, say, a computer), although there are many ways of researching and committing thoughts to words — on screens or, as so many writers do first, in notebooks with favorite pens or pencils. Each writer needs to decide what works for himself or herself, knowing that strategies will evolve through time.
There are morning writers (I am one), nighttime writers. Writers who spend hours in the process. Others (or as I heard the biographer Stacy Schiff say) who write until the caffeine wears off. What is a good day’s work? That depends. The novelist Hortense Calisher, who was the college professor who managed to engage me with fiction as no one else ever had, said she would set a daily goal of one good paragraph. Nonfiction writers in full gear can turn out thousands of words at a sitting. The work of editing your own work and then revising, based on editorial mandates, is again widely variable.
There is no one formula to accomplishing the writing challenge.
The point is that each of us starts out as a beginner and over time, with effort, can develop the means to produce pages, using the technique that seems to work best for each person, some that come instinctively and some with guidance and support.
Ultimately, the quality of written work comes down to inherent skill, talent, and commitment and is going to be judged by other people, who will be knowledgeable or ignorant, supportive or hostile. Writing for others to read delivers a considerable range of criticism and acclaim. And the writer needs to be aware of this inevitability and accept it.
When it comes to the publishing process itself, many writers — too many, I think — don’t understand or misunderstand what is happening to their book, which is why I so often hear expressions of this kind:
I can’t find an agent.
I can’t find a publisher.
The publisher didn’t promote my book.
I got great reviews, but the book didn’t sell.
Why didn’t the publicist get me more bookings?
Everyone says I should hire an outside publicist because the publisher doesn’t know how to get the attention I want.
Why don’t I get reports I understand from the publisher (or my agent)?
Why can’t my friends and my family find my book in stores?
Why is my book on a remainder table?
And there is the issue of remuneration, the crucial matter of getting paid for your effort and performance. Questions like these: What is an advance? How are royalties calculated? Is it true that most books sell fewer than a thousand copies? Is it possible to live on what most writers earn? Can you make money if you self-publish?
For as many of these issues as possible, I will explain the process and answer the questions. Undoubtedly, some answers will raise more questions.
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Anticipating that not every question will be addressed in the chapters to come, I am adding a new feature to the Substack, a subscriber chat:
This is meant to be a conversation space accessible to subscribers — a place for comments, questions, and the kind of observations we all have and might want to express if there were a place to do that. Comments are fine, but I’ve observed that over time comments sections tend to become more for denunciation than discussion. The principle of the chat is to engage less publicly than X, Bluesky, Threads, or the other social media platforms and to do so with people who have shown enough interest to follow or subscribe.
I came to Substack after decades writing in and for many other places. This is different because only people who have asked for it will get it. This suggests that we have common interests and instincts, and here is a means of sharing them.
Get the Substack app by clicking this link or the button below. New chat threads won’t be sent sent via email, so turn on push notifications so you don’t miss conversation as it happens. You can also access chat on the web.
Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for my chat inside.
That’s it! Jump into my thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.
