It's all about target audience.

1. Who is my target audience?
2. Where is my targeted audience?
3. What is the real value of my edit (information) to that audience?
4. What is the most efficient method to reach the maximum targeted audience?
5. How do I keep my information valuable and fresh for my targeted audience?

This explains why I have so many personal rejection letters that compliment my writing and my organization -- and some even end with, "I hope to work with you in the future," but I still don't have a book credit.

The real gem of this post is within the parentheses of the last sentence -- a book proposal is like a business plan for a book idea. I've recently asked a couple of published friends if I could see their proposals, and I was left with my chin on my chest in awe over their marketing plans. After reading them, I realized that my little page-long marketing plans seemed really vague and incomplete compared to their plans, which were three for four pages long and filled with VERY detailed information (names of contact people, venues for speaking, etc). When I read this post, it clicked that they had written a business plan for their books.

Crappy writing is the norm in prescriptive (or informative) nonfiction.

• lose weight
• make money
• find love
  
• (or … even write better!)

The great selling handle gets the book sold into stores, in large quantities.
Great content makes sure the book sells through the register, into readers' hands.

Now, after two years of, let’s call it, non-success, I understand that the problem is at least as much about publicity and distribution as it is about quality. (At least I hope that’s the problem.) So I’m here to announce that if TOW Books is going to fail at publishing, we are going to fail in our own spectacularly new way.

How badly are we struggling? Well, we’ve released four books. Their Amazon rankings at the time of this typing are:

170,374
388,165
706,198
1,033,377

The most distressing part is that last number belongs to a book I wrote, So You Want to Be President? — a book that should have been especially relevant and timely given that it’s a guide to running for office when totally unqualified. I hope it’s in Governor Palin’s briefing materials.

… please don't apologize for the times you have to be discouraging. It's for the best, you know. Of course, you should also know this is coming from someone who: (1) has no memoir plans, and (2) spent a couple of decades in the banking business. (Really, Ms. Smith, I am doing you a favor declining your million-dollar request for a loan to open a fuzzy-cheese-head-car-airfreshener-thingy business.)
 
To close, here are a few quotes for fun. I do a bit of volunteer smoothreading (sort of like proofreading but more relaxed) for Distributed Proofreaders / Project Gutenberg. The day before your presentation, I finished a smoothy on a short book titled If You Don't Write Fiction by Charles Phelps Cushing (1920). Here are a couple of my favorites—some things don't change much, huh?

A huge army of disappointed scribblers have followed that haphazard plan of battle. They would know better than to try to market crates of eggs to a shoe store, but they see nothing equally absurd in shipping a popular science article to the Atlantic Monthly or an "uplift" essay to the Smart Set. They paper their walls with rejection slips, fill up a trunk with returned manuscripts and pose before their sympathetic friends as martyrs.
 
… Which is to say that novelists and magazine fiction writers are accused of becoming more concerned about how their stories will film than about how the manuscripts will grade as pieces of literature. To get a yarn into print is still worth while because this enhances its value in the eyes of the  producers of motion pictures. But the author's real goal is "no longer good writing, so much as remunerative picture possibilities."

At PW I would get a lot of self-published memoirs for review, and authors never quite understood why I wasn't assigning their work.  I couldn't exactly say, "Your writing sucks," even if that happened to be true, but I would tell them the same kinds of things you are saying here -- that unless you already have a celebrity platform or some kind of wonderful eat-pray-love kind of experience, no one outside your immediate circle is usually going to care what you have to say.

I laughed when I saw your description of writers who rely on their friends and family to tell them that their writing is terrific and sure to be featured on Oprah.  I was on a panel once with an editor who asked all the first-time writers in the audience if they had ever seen the early episodes of American Idol.  Most had.  He said something like, "Those people who can't sing are always telling Simon Cowell, 'But my friends and my parents say I'm a really great singer!' And those people are horrible singers. You need a professional opinion."  It was a great analogy and, judging from the uncomfortable looks of many people in the audience, he got his point across.

Another technique I have tried when speaking to writers is to ask them about the memoirs they have read recently.  What did they like about them?  Then I point out that the memoirs they have mentioned are without exception either a) written by celebrities or b) already bestsellers.  It's a sobering thing when they realize that if THEY don't read memoir when it's not already water-cooler talk, why should anyone plunk down $24.95 for their story?

• perseverance (my answer)
• keep writing, get it done
• believe in yourself
  
• forget the market, write your own book
• get the words right

WRITER AT WORK
Do Not Disturb
Note: Will make exceptions for those bearing contracts, chocolates, or margaritas.

• Always be professional. You'll be bumping into agents or editors; you don't where such a meeting will eventually lead. You are interviewing for the job of author.
• Be extroverted even if not by nature. Talk to everyone you can; you're among like people. Network. You need contacts.
• Don't sell yourself (pitch to editors/agents) unless you're asked to.
• Sleep when you get home. Attend everything, go to everything, both formal and informal. (And do the eat-there-stay-there option if available.)
• Take a day to follow-up after the conference; send thank-yous.
• Take time afterward to note what excites you most, then act on it.

• No clear protagonist-problem. Of the manuscripts I read, only two had a very clear protagonist with an identifiable problem. For most first-time novelists, this is a requirement for a story beginning. Also, several manuscripts had more than three POV characters in first 15 pages, which can create a dizzying experience for the reader. It's a big risk.
• Slow start. About half of the manuscripts I read had very slow starts, where the story was mainly taking place in the characters' heads, or it suffered from too much backstory too soon. Resist the temptation to flashback or give a lot of detail about the past; move the story forward instead, and weave in the backstory (only as absolutely required) as you go. I recommend Hooked by Les Edgerton to help refine your first few chapters.
  
• In two manuscripts I read, the authors were trying to position their work as fiction, but it was clearly a true-to-life story. In both cases, the authors felt their stori