I've made my living as a writer for a very long time now, but I've kept a respectful (wistful) distance from the realm of runaway bestseller hits. The second book with my name on the cover, which appeared when I was 23 years old, eventually sold in the millions and millions of copies. Unfortunately I had hired on as a writer for a total fee I now recall as being $500, though it could have been as much as $750.
—more than 40 years ago.
It was the book at the right, Who Runs Congress?, the result of a Ralph Nader project, which I wrote with Mark Green and David Zwick in a summer-long eight-week burst. The bulk of the proceeds went not to the authors but to build the Nader movement, which has been mainly to the good. (Yes, I know ... ) My first book, The Water Lords, was from another Nader project two years earlier, and I believe then the pay consisted of room and board plus $250.
After the Congress Project experience I leapt at a "real" writing job that came open, at The Washington Monthly (replacing Taylor Branch, and working with Walter Shapiro) for $8400 per year. Since then I have been grateful for whatever I could earn in journalism. I also decided after my negotiating brilliance with Who Runs Congress? that my best career prospects weren't as a deal-maker.
Now I have a chance to ride once again in the sidecar of publishing success. More than a decade ago, I wrote an Atlantic article about the productivity expert David Allen. He is the author of a very successful book called Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity and originator of what is now known as the GTD approach to life. Since then I've stayed in touch with David Allen, seen him once or twice per year, and come to think of him and his wife Kathryn as friends.
Some readers may never have heard of David Allen; others will recognize him as a celebrity. As @GTDGuy, he has 1.2 million followers on Twitter; his GTD seminars attract large audiences around the world; and the original Getting Things Done has sold steadily in large volumes since its appearance in 2002.
And tomorrow, the first major revision of Getting Things Done goes on sale. It's been updated to reflect the changes in world technology in the dozen years since its first publication, and also to reflect some of the life lessons David Allen has learned in that time. I know those things about the book because I had the opportunity and pleasure of reading an advance draft so as to write the Foreword to this new edition—which I did on a purely volunteer basis and as a gesture of respect, friendship, and hope that people actually read the book!