Stern - Howard Stern Comes Again

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This book is dedicated to all the animals that my wife, Beth, and I have rescued over the years. Here is a painting I did of one of them. Her name was Sophia.

Or: How Simon & Schuster Bamboozled Me into Doing Another Book

I ts been over twenty years since my last book, and I vowed I would never do this again. The experience was miserable for me. Writing a book is extremely hard workthe kind of work that was required of me in college when writing a paper analyzing Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini movies. (I was a communications major with a minor in journalism, and I graduated one of those cum laudesmagna or summa, I cant remember which.) What made writing books even more grueling was my obsessive-compulsive disorder. Ive struggled with OCD my whole life, and if you want to torture someone with OCD, just make them write a book. They will obsess over every single word, endlessly deliberate over each comma and period. It is excruciating. For the past two decades, publishers had been after me to write a third book, but I didnt want to subject myself to all that pain and suffering, and besides, I had enough going on with my radio show and the few years I spent judging on Americas Got Talent , so the answer was always no.

So why did I do it? Because Simon & Schuster handed me a finished copy. Tricky bastards.

Heres what happened. In April 2017, I agreed to take a meeting with this guy Jonathan Karp, number one top muckety-muck at Simon & Schuster. A mutual acquaintance, Vinnie Favaleat the time vice president of late night programming for CBShad put him in touch with my longtime agent, Don Buchwald. Like I said, I usually shot down publishers, but I googled Jonathan and something in his impressive rsum grabbed my attention. Before joining Simon & Schuster, hed worked for another publisher, where he started his own imprint that only released twelve books a year. While most big publishers put out hundreds of books a year, Jonathan had decided to do just a dozenone book a monthfocusing on projects he passionately believed in and putting the full force of marketing and publicity behind them. This was speaking my language. I had always been disappointed that publishers were so academic and didnt think of a book in the same way one might think of the opening of a movie. Book promotion had a lot of showbiz catching up to do. Apparently, Jonathan agreed with me. Sure, I told Don, Ill meet with him. I had zero intention of doing a book, but I figured itd be an interesting conversation.

Jonathan came over to my apartment. (Though Id take the meeting, no way was I leaving the house for it.) He walked in with a finished copy of this book you are holding in your handsan actual bound version, with a cover and everything.

You dont have to do a thing, he said. We want a book of your best interviews, and we took the liberty of putting it together to show you how easy it is and how little work youll have to do.

Crazy, right? I was impressed and flattered. Ive been wined and dined in my career, and after spending so many years hustling and striving it is always enjoyable when someone tries to convince me to come work for them, but this took it to a whole new level. Surely no one in the history of publishing had ever gone to so much trouble to get a dude to write a book. It was intoxicating and appealed to my ego, and at the same time addressed all my concerns about another literary effort. Free money. No work. Ive always dreamt of such a wonderful occurrence. In fact, many years ago when the religious right was raising millions of dollars from their base to try and force me off the air, I would think, If they just took that money and paid me not to broadcast, we would all be happy and everyone could get on with something more important than banning penis jokes. So when I held this lovely book in my hands, I was psyched. Just put my name on this and Im going to get paid? Cmon, lets go.

I showed the book to my wife, Beth, hoping she might be impressed to find me emerging from my office with a finished tome. She would marvel at the brilliance of her husband who could crank out masterpieces at speeds only known to the Flash and Superman. In her eyes, I would be a regular Howard Dostoyevsky. Of course, she looked at the book, turned to me, and said, Whats going on here? She was having none of it. She knew a scam was afoot.

I went ahead and signed the contract anyway. What do they say? Whenever something seems too good to be true, it probably is. Well, it was.

Jonathan had suggested I could just flip through the finished book and tweak it here and there, maybe write a little intro. One afternoon I sat down in my office to put in what I expected would be just a few hours of work. Not months, not dayshours. Suddenly, reality crept in. These arent really my favorite interviews, I thought. Uh-oh. I dont really love the picture on the cover. Oh no. Hold itwouldnt it be way more interesting if I could craft a book not only featuring my interviews, but one in which I write about my experiences in broadcasting? What if I could explain to some aspiring radio personality the art of the interview, offer a primer on my approach, chronicle how it has evolved over the years? Forget a little intro. What if I wrote an introduction for every interviewshared what I was thinking at the time and what I thought looking back now?

Oh no, here we go again with the OCDthose nasty thoughts that were going to screw up the simplicity of all this. I ended up throwing out that finished book and starting from scratch. I would look in the trash and say to that book, Curse you! Why arent you good enough for me? My agent, Don, told me I was overthinking it, and perhaps he was right, but I couldnt put out a book that didnt authentically represent me and my journey.

So here we are... two years later. You now hold in your hands two years of work and labor. Perfectionor as close to it as I can come. Thats my problem: everything has to be perfect. And since were talking about the art of interviewing, lets go ahead and call that rule number one: Nothing is casual. Everything requires work, research, and thought. Agonize. Take it seriously. Dont leave it up to someone else, and dont phone it in. There is no such thing as a shortcut if you are going to turn in good work. If I ever enjoy the process, I know I have somehow produced something worthless. Ive prided myself on putting energy and time into everything I do, and this book has been no different. I ended up devoting way more of my life to this than anyone thought would be required. I invested so much in it that Im sure I will never ever go through this again. I swear I mean it this time.

My hat is off to Jonathan Karp. That whole concept of handing me a finished product worked. It got me to sign on and agree to write a book, even though this in no way resembles what he brought meexcept for the binding. What a smart plan: show him the end result and well lure him in like the fish that he is.