How good does your book proposal have to be to win a book contract? “It has to sing.” That’s what veterans of the book business will tell you. A proposal that falls short of your best work will fail to get a hearing from editors.

Of course there are exceptions. If you’re rich and famous and can guarantee big sales, editors will be all ears. Otherwise, you have to display your writing chops in the proposal. If you don’t display well, you won’t hear your phone ringing from an editor.

What must sing particularly well is the introduction. It must hook the editor’s full attention. It must also summarize the issue or predicament you address. And it must state your message, your book’s chapter-by-chapter approach, your credentials, and the prospects for marketing and selling lots of copies of the final product.

Palgrave Macmillan published my book, Merchants of Virtue: Herman Miller and the Making of a Sustainable Company. Below is the introduction, reprinted verbatim from its submission in late 2009.

INTRODUCTION

Paul Murray’s boss thought Murray was a hero. In May 1988, Murray took a job on a wood-finishing line in Zeeland, Michigan. He was a paint chemist, a guru in the science of stains, varnishes, and clearcoats. His task was to help Herman Miller, Inc., coat its chair seats, desktops, and other furniture without paint blisters. Herman Miller had been hauling $150,000 worth of spoiled, blistered product to the landfill each month.

Murray himself didn’t think he was a hero – at least not in any way that mattered. True, in his first year, he tuned the coating process so adeptly that he cut the $150,000 loss to just $5,000. But as Murray sought permits to upgrade the line, state officials calculated it would emit 100 tons of solvent into the air every year. So much solvent, in fact, that Herman Miller would have to install a thermal oxidizer, a unit to eliminate toxic gases.

            Solvents to Murray were like fire – good for some things, god-awful for others. Mention the word and he’d tell you about his toddler son. Between 1979 and 1985, when Murray worked as a research chemist at Boise Cascade and PPG Industries, the skin of his son, Matt, would periodically erupt in rashes – usually just after Murray got home. The boy then began to struggle to breathe. A few times, he began to choke – and Murray swept him in his arms for a dash to the hospital.

            Matt had unusual allergies – he nearly died once after touching the skin of a fish. But he never touched the chemicals his father handled. And Murray reasoned that those chemicals, the likes of xylene and toluene, evaporated so fast they were gone before he stepped out of the lab door. Still, to be on the safe side, he started showering and changing clothes before coming home from work. Perhaps, he thought, residues were the problem.

            Murray also began to wonder: “If I’m doing this to my home environment, what am I doing to the overall environment?”

            At Herman Miller, a number of years later, Murray began to wonder even more about the same thing. The $1.6 billion company, best known for high-end, award-winning chairs like the Eames Lounge Chair and the Aeron desk chair, had long stressed personal values and community responsibility. As far back as the 1950s, company founder D.J. De Pree said the company “will be a good corporate neighbor by being a good steward of the environment.”

            But the question for Murray now was this: Was Herman Miller a good steward in 1988? From what he could tell, the stewardship practiced by the company was no longer as admirable as it had once been. It looked good only in comparison to that at other companies. It still made chairs of wood cut from endangered rain forests. It still sent 41 million pounds of waste yearly to landfills. In 1989, the first year in which U.S. companies reported toxic emissions publicly, it disclosed releases of 200,000 pounds. A good chunk of that poundage was solvents.

            What was clear to Murray was that the right and proper practices in the 1980s and before were not going to be right and proper in the 1990s and after. A gap was emerging, and Herman Miller was on the 1980s side of it. The gap, in fact, was widening into a chasm.

            Merchants of Virtue is about Murray and a band of people who bridge that gap. They end up answering one of the critical questions of our time: Is sustainable business sustainable? Can employees in global companies make great products, take care of the environment, benefit society, and make good money – all at the same time, good times and bad?

The jury was out in the late 1980s. For many companies it still is. But Herman Miller’s “roving leaders,” as people inside the company call people like Murray, rose to this challenge. They showed that companies do not have to drain the natural wealth of the earth to produce goods and services for mankind. They do not have to endanger the health of ecosystems. Companies can design, build, use, and dispose of things as part of a cyclical process that mimics the cycles of nature. They can build natural and financial wealth at the same time.

            Murray and his fellow employees were predisposed to their quest. They grew up in the boomer generation that witnessed U.S. lawmakers pass the first Clean Air Act in 1970. They watched green activists launch Earth Day. They recoiled at catastrophes in the 1980s like the Bhopal gas poisoning in India and the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska. They recognized that corporations, like individuals, have obligations to society. And one of those obligations is to stop the scourge of environmental deterioration created by misguided industrialization.

            Surprisingly, the journey to sustainability at Herman Miller does not take place in a New Age enterprise. It happens in a conservative Midwest manufacturing company. Murray and others, though raised during a time of expanded corporate responsibility, are not placard-holding environmental activists. They are sharp-penciled business people. Woven into their beliefs is what D.J. De Pree taught them above all: Producing profits in a business is akin to “breathing.”

Even so, these people showed something even the activists could not – that sustainability in business is sustainable, if only people go about it the right way.

            And they showed it is sustainable in spite of the unrelenting array of antagonistic forces plaguing every company – an attitude of indifference and short-termism, a preference for expedient solutions, the constant temptation to sacrifice principles for profit. They also showed it is sustainable even amid the punishing downturns in the business cycle. During the dot-com crash, Herman Miller laid off nearly half its people and closed over a million square feet of plant space. During the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009, it has tightened its belt similarly. Through it all, Herman Miller’s people pursued the journey to sustainability. They continued to ask new questions, test new ideas, and rethink and restructure the nature of work.

            Merchants of Virtue tells this story from the point of view of Murray and other people who made the changes. It does not simply recount the story of a CEO who, by dint of power, commanded a sea change in business. It instead tells of researchers and designers and engineers and factory bosses who made great things happen in back rooms and on the factory floor. These people, across the ranks, joined to advance a revolution. They reached new insights, recast policies, changed behaviors, and redesigned management. They also changed the people around them – and they can change all of us. [End excerpt]

Merchants of Virtue is a narrative book, so the introduction starts in that vein. Introductions, however, can vary. The point is to make your writing sparkle from the start.

A proposal has much more in it, of course. Along with chapter summaries, my proposal included sections on story organization, book positioning, the market for the book, competing books, promotion plans, and my credentials. The proposal is part book plan and part business plan. It positions you to produce both a winning product and one that sells.

[Revised January 2020. Originally published May 30, 2011]