Q&A books

Author: I picked up three new books yesterday. One was about starting a business, one was about documentary film-making, and the other was about yoga. You know what they had in common?

Artist:They’d all been reviewed on Oprah?

Author: No, none of them were in the league of big sales. They were how-to books but all pretty good in terms of content, breadth of view and so on.

Artist:Written by a team of writers, not a single author?

Author: Close. No, each book had one writer. Funny you should mention Oprah because each author had gone around interviewing experts in the field they were writing about. Entrepreneurs, screen writers, yoga teachers.

Artist: And those experts were willing to spill the beans on their secrets?

Author: You know how it is. An interview is free publicity and people at the top of their field like to talk and once they start talking they generally tell stories and so it all comes out.

Artist:So interviewing is becoming a new genre?

Author: A new style of informative writing maybe. Extended Q&A. Elements of less formal writing creeping in maybe. Length of books increasing, these ones each ran 400 to 500 hundred pages. And were produced quickly, generally over the course of one year.

Artist: Pretty hard to crank out that many pages in that time without a little help. Sounds good. You get others to tell you what to write and you bootstrap yourself to instant wisdom.

Author: You just have to do the initial persuading, know the field and know what question will unlock the speaker.

Artist: And remember to turn the tape recorder on.
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