Subject: book idea
From: "Rob Norton" <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Feb 2012 08:37:16 -0500

Thinking more about this and I think we should go with an "advocates making
a better world" angle and create a book that's positive and a motivator to
enter public service. This could be an introductory chapter that may start
by saying that advocates or "lobbyists" are often viewed with suspicion,
often with good reason, but a lot of good work has been accomplished by
people who do this work. Then we follow with (roughly) 5 accounts of how
good work was accomplished by dedicated advocates who are exemplary public
servants. We need to select the cases carefully because they each need to
include 1-2 interesting anecdotes that involve public people doing things
that are unexpected. Gary Edson's PEPFAR story is a great example and I
think we need to try and get interviews with President Bush (maybe Gary
could even swing Bono) to reinforce this and give the account a lot of
cache. We'll need to identify 4 more cases that give us opportunities to
take the same approach and those cases will need to cross party lines. In
other words, the book needs to provide cool, behind the scenes stories of
all kinds of people working hard as advocates to make a better world. Maybe
one of the cases addresses Haiti so we could include President Clinton.

This approach gives a publisher a few hooks to promote the book. First, it
seems to me that there's a lot of opportunity here to highlight untold,
behind the scenes stories of public people working hard to do good work --
a human interest hook that may generate stories that one might see in the
Washington Post Style section or on the morning news/talk shows. The goal
should be to include at least one anecdote in each case that would be
newsworthy and worth a short discussion or highlight on a morning news show
-- the strange bedfellows approach or some other story that demonstrates
the humanity of the principals and will capture people's attention. Second,
we stake out a position that there are some advocates/lobbyists that do
good work and provide an interesting "side" for political talk shows...
"these guys say not all lobbyists are bad -- let's talk to them hear
why"... that type of thing. The key is having the hard examples and
anecdotes that allow us to tell the story and that will serve as hooks to
want to read the book and hear us talk about it. On a more basic level, we
would be able to do some promotion in the Washington area bookstores like
Politics & Prose, but if we have strong anecdotes maybe this can expand
outside the beltway.

I'm biased, but this seems feasible. The key is having some good stories to
make it all interesting