Today I speak with the author of Feeding the Monster, a book about the John Henry-Tom Werner ownership group of the Boston Red Sox. In 2004, he published Hard News, a Washington Post Best Book of the Year. He is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. In 2002 and 2003, he was a senior writer at Newsweek, where he wrote the media column "Raw Copy" and also covered politics and popular culture. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, New York, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post Book World, Spin, Slate, Salon, and other publications. He did not take this photo of himself, however: that was done by John Huba.

What plans to you have to promote your new book?
I'll be doing most of the usual stuff -- book tour, lots of radio interviews, some TV stuff, etc. Simon & Schuster and I also have some ideas tailored specifically to this book, like tie-ins at Red Sox-centric sports bars. And I set up my website and began putting up daily entries as well as posting outtakes from interviews done for the book in an effort to get people interested in and talking about it before it comes out. So far, that seems to be working: in the first week the site's been up, there have been days where I've exceeded 20,000 page views, and it looks like pre-sales are pretty healthy as well.

What was the most difficult part of working on it and how did you deal with it?
The most difficult part for me is always the actual writing. I find it?excruciatingly painful. For this book I basically waited until the last possible moment and then locked myself in an office until I was done.

Do you think there was a particular turning point in your writing career where you went from an aspiring/struggling/fledgling writer to a professional?
I guess the main turning point was when I got a job at the Palm Beach Post in the spring of 1998. I'd had paying gigs as a writer before -- doing freelance music writing; working for a children's magazine; helping to edit a journal about genetics and bioethics -- but the Post was the first place where I felt like a real working journalist. It was great for me because it helped me get over my feeling that nothing I wrote was ever quite good enough: when you're on deadline and need to file a story for the next day's paper, you can't indulge your insecurities and neuroses. There still are plenty of situations in which I'm anxious about a job or an assignment, but ever since then I've felt more comfortable introducing myself as a reporter.

Do you have to change speeds or styles significantly when you're covering sports, music, media or book reviews or is it mostly just a change of subject matter?
Most of the reporting I do feels pretty similar. I want to tell a story, and to do that I need to collect information and then assemble it in a way that makes sense to the reader. That's more or less the same whether I'm writing about the Times or the Red Sox. Criticism -- which I do much less of now -- is a different beast entirely.

How do you work to make specific topics appealing to a wide audience? I.e. what did you do to make Feeding the Monster of interest to those who don't care for the Red Sox?
Really every topic is specialized and specific: the natural audience for a book about Enron is businesspeople and those involved in the energy industries; the natural audience for a book about insider trading is people who work on Wall Street. But for any non-fiction book there's a way to turn a very specific story into a narrative that deals with larger themes. Feeding the Monster is obviously a book about baseball and about the Red Sox. But it's also a book about the role institutions play in the collective consciousness of a region and a book about the pitfalls of success and a book about the tensions that arise within any highly competitive workplace. When Nomar Garciaparra talks about the resentment he feels because he was only making $11 million a year compared to the $19 or $25 million some other players were making, he's talking about a kind of jealousy that is present in every workplace.

Another thing I've tried very consciously to do in both my books is to inject excitement into a story in which the outcome is already known. A big part of Feeding the Monster deals with the sale of the Red Sox in 2001. Obviously, readers will know who the current owners are, and therefore who won the right to buy the team. That doesn't mean that process can't be rendered in such a way that's gripping and dramatic and compelling. Same thing goes for the 2004 World Series, or the effort to sign Johnny Damon, or whatever. Some of that has to do with new details, but a lot of it has to do with pacing and recognizing that readers want to be taken on an exciting ride. It's up to the writer to make sure that happens.