Pete Rose, one of the greatest baseball players of
all time, has submitted an appeal of his 26-year-old lifetime ban from Major
League Baseball. He’s hoping the ban
will be lifted, leaving him eligible for consideration as a candidate for the
Baseball Hall of Fame. He broke the
cardinal rule of betting – on his team – while managing a team. I wonder what sins or cardinal rules guide us
in regards to writing books, promoting them, or marketing books. How about these three?
First
Rule
Thou shall not make up a story (unless it’s
fiction!).
Second
Rule
Thou shall not plagiarize.
Third
Rule
Thou shall make sure the book is edited and
spell-checked properly.
After that, there are general rules to follow when
it comes to selecting a title, designing a cover, figuring the length of the
book, and pricing it. There are certain
times of the year some books should be released and there are certain
guidelines as to which format best fits its content. But none of this compares to the first three
rules.
If you break the first one, you are discredited. If you ignore rule two, you can be
discredited, too. Both could lead to
lawsuits and public shaming, not to mention professional suicide. The third one shouldn’t happen but can be
forgiven.
Rose, who collected more base hits than any one of
the 20,000 men to play baseball at its highest level since the 1869 founding of
the league, won a number of World Series rings and was a perennial all-star who
was popular over a career that spanned nearly 25 years. But in 1989 he was dumped from baseball. The baseball commissioner who imposed the ban
died just days later, forever leaving Rose in limbo.
Many still believe he did something so wrong that he
does not deserve to be in a special category of elite athletes. Others separate what he did post-playing days
and believe he’s suffered long enough.
In the world of book publishing, how forgiving or understanding can we
be when it comes to writing lies, copying the words of others, or putting out a
grammatically-challenged book?
Sometimes we forgive people, but in a different way
than they’d expect. For instance, some
people who succeed at being screw-ups, like a drunken actor or an abusive
singer, get second careers because of the fame attached to their poor behavior. Look at reality shows like Celebrity
Apprentice, where being a loser is a resume-qualifier for the show. Writers may want to be famous, but no one
really should strive for infamy.
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Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog
are his alone and not that of his employer. You can follow him on Twitter
@theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more
important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by
BookMarketingBuzzBlog © 2015
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