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."

Publishers are best placed to build author-centric and subject/theme-oriented websites--not sites oriented around a "brand" that isn't relevant, but those that focus attention on segments of the business that remain relevant to consumers.

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?