Good Friday: HOW to get a book deal
This is the first of my regular Good Friday installments. Each week I’ll chronicle the progress and the process of writing and designing the book. Since this is the first post, I’ll have to play a little catch up.
In the summer of 2007, I spent a week in rural Alabama, advising to Project M. Walking down a quiet country road with Brian Collins one evening, we got to chatting about how transformative our time in Alabama had been.
Brian resolved then and there to dedicate his new agency to the philosophy of problem seeking¹ rather than problem solving — a central tenet of the M experience. Brian, who was familiar with my writing², suggested that I write a book around this concept, and so I decided to.
I did a little research to see what other books on the topic of designing for the greater good already existed and basically found there were none. Steve Heller’s Citizen Designer was close, but included no visual examples. Milton Glaser’s & Mirko Ilic’s The Design of Dissent addressed one slice of socially-engaged design, and Lucienne Roberts’ Good: An introduction to ethics in graphic design represented a more academic investigation of the subject from a broadly defined ethical standpoint. What was missing — in my estimation — was a book that showcased, celebrated and explained design projects that exhibited both a morality of craft³ and of purpose. So that is what I set out to write.
A few weeks later I submitted a 10-page book proposal to my editor at HOW, Megan Patrick. A few weeks after that she politely turned it down. HOW’s research, it turned out, showed that there wasn’t much of a market for a book like this. Other titles that approximated the same subject matter had fared poorly in the past, and there was no indication that things would be different now. Numbers don’t lie, but my gut told me otherwise. I shopped it to a couple of other publishers, each of whom told me the same thing. I shelved the proposal and forgot about it. HOW magazine asked if I would do an article on the subject, which I did for their August, 2008 issue in a 6-page piece called For Goodness Sake.
About six months after that I started noticing related books in the upcoming titles notices from various publishers, notably Do Good Design (David Berman), SustainAble (Aaris Sherin) and Designing for the Greater Good (Peleg Top). In light of this, I decided to approach HOW again. This time they accepted. A few weeks later I had a contract. Shortly after that I received HOW’s updated author guidelines and an editorial schedule and just like that I started working on this, my fourth book.
I’m currently selecting a short list of essayists and requesting content from a variety of sources. For the past two years I’ve bookmarked any project I’ve come across that I thought might fit into this book. In addition to reaching out to those sources, there is an open call for submissions. Of course, if you know of an amazing project you think should be included, please let me know.
Stay Tuned.
Footnotes:
¹ I first mentioned this term in my 2008 piece for HOW magazine entitled For Goodness Sake. Read it here.
² I’ve interviewed Brian three times — once about his work for the 2012 NYC Olympic bid (LogoLab, 2004), again for STEP column My First Time, and most recently for the HOW article mentioned above. He’s never short of inspiring and always entertaining.
³ The idea of “the morality of craft” is reportedly attributed to Wynton Marsalis. My TA brought it up in a class last semester, but I haven’t been able to verify its origin. It’s a complex and compelling notion, so I hope someone takes credit for it.