November 24, 2009
Recently, I sent off the manuscript
for “Writers Gone Wild,” another milestone reached in getting my first book to market.
There’s plenty of work to come: more edits and rewrites, plotting the marketing campaign and fishing for blurbs, but the most important part of the process is done.
For my own record and I hope for your amusement, let me recap the journey from idea to manuscript, and list a few lessons I learned along the way:
GENESIS
* 1993: Read in Michael Holroyd’s biography of George Bernard Shaw that he bought condoms before losing his cherry to Jenny Patterson, an older woman and friend of his mother. Made note.
* 1993-2008: Collect more stories about writers -- when Truman Capote read in The New York Times about the Clutter murder that became “In Cold Blood”; how Ernest Lawrence Thayer wrote “Casey at the Bat”; James Whitcomb Riley publishing a poem he wrote claiming it was by Poe -- and started organizing them with thought of doing “on this day” style of book. Also collected interesting quotes and birth and death dates, with vague notions of someone making a book out of it.
* 2000: Wrote book proposal for “The Red Cat God’s Guide to Literature.” The RCG was a 3-foot-tall wooden statue we bought that had been carved in Indonesia. For some reason, I thought this would make the book more interesting. Sent to two agents. Rejected both times. Abashed, set project aside.
* May 2008: Fed up with dithering, decide to start posting material to website. Resolve to write something almost every day, no matter what. Some days post long essay, some days brief bulleted items.
MANIFESTATION
* September 2008: Began work on new proposal for “WRITERS 365: A Year of Impertinent Stories About Famous Novelists, Poets, Journalists and Other Scribblers,” helped along with authentic proposals provided by author Jonathan Maberry at a recent Pennwriter conference.
* October 2008: Begin sending out first batch of proposals. Result: 23 rejections, 5 asked for more material, 9 never answered and 2 might not have received it.
* January 2009: Signed with Rita Rosenkranz. More rewriting of proposal to change year’s worth of stories into a collection of anecdotes. Each anecdote limited to about 300 words. WRITERS 365 morphs into WRITERS GONE WILD.
* February-May 2009: More rewrites of proposals. Editor at Major Publishing House shows interest, wants to see rewrites as well. Continue posting stories to website.
PRODUCTION
* May 2009: Sign contract for WRITERS GONE WILD with deadline of November 15. Mild panic ensues at thought of putting together 60K manuscript in seven months. Sets secret deadline of October 1, calculates daily word goals, sets up calendar, and begins.
* June-November 2009: Write furiously by day, go to work in the evening. Weekends off for chores.
* November 15: Finish collection with anecdote about Shaw boinking Jenny Patterson, satisfying self with bringing the project around to the story that inspired it all. At 1:30 a.m. Nov. 16, e-mail manuscript to editor and fall into fitful sleep wondering at what I had just done.
And there you have it: A book that took 15 years of planning and 18 months to write, and you should see it on the shelves about a year from now.
Along the way, here are the lessons I learned:
* You can’t be too organized: It’s easier to work faster when you can lay your hands on the material you need at that moment. In the case of WGW, that meant two bookcases full of books, two file cabinet drawers full of folders, and a hard drive crammed with newspaper and magazine articles, blog posts and pages pulled from Google Books.
Speaking of which:
* Google Books is my friend: I probably could have finished WGW with the material at hand and acquired through Hershey library’s interlibrary loan department (Hi, Denise!), but Google Books made it so much easier to find source documents and leads to books to acquire through purchase or ILL.
* Document as you go: WGW required a bibliography, and even if it meant disturbing the flow, it was much easier to document my sources after each essay, rather than wait until the end (which I had to do for the early essays, and believe me, it was painful trying to figure out where I got some of the material from).
* Preserve material taken from the Internet: Vitally important. Websites fade into electrons. Newspapers close their archives behind pay walls. If you grab material, whether on paper or on hard drive, preserve the URL and the date you acquired it. A little effort now saves a lot of tears later.
Speaking of which:
* Back up, back up, BACK UP: I have copies of everything on an external hard drive, another computer and on CD. Saved my sanity when I pulled the plug on a Windows upgrade and hosed my computer so badly that it took a mechanic to revive it.
There’s also a couple more valuable lessons:
* Don’t wait: Look again at the date when the Agent and Editor signed WGW. Rita took on the project during the economic meltdown between Election Day and the inauguration. The book was sold, with an advance, while people were losing their jobs. If I had waited until the economy got better, maybe the book wouldn’t have sold. Maybe the advance would have been smaller. Don’t wait for opportunity to knock; your hearing will go first.
* Be flexible: The original proposal called for a collection of 365 stories organized by day. At least two agents and an editor told me the book was too long, and didn’t seem enthused by the “story a day” concept. Even though I had been married to the idea for more than a decade, I agreed and ended up selling a collection that was shorter and easier to organize. They’re happy, and I needed to do less work (and still have plenty of material for a sequel, hint hint).
So that's how you can become an overnight success in 16 years. In the months to come, in between book reviews and other posts, I'll drop in to describe the publishing process as I see it. I hope you'll stick around.
Enjoy this post? Share it with others.
