The Waiting Game - Not as Fun as it Sounds ;)

I've said it before and I'll say it again. This business hasn't taught me patience...it's just taught me how much I hate waiting :D

Well, that's not totally true. I AM a little better at waiting, mostly because I know to expect it now. But for me, the waiting is the worst part of this business. And here's a little secret, (for me at least) it gets worse on every step.

See, there's the waiting to get crits back from betas. Not fun. Will they like it? Will they shred my poor baby? But, this step of the process doesn't usually take that long, so over all, it's not so bad.

Then there is the waiting on queries. This is really not fun. Definitely the most hated part of the querying process for me. Don't get me wrong, rejects suck. But waiting for that response....miserable. Especially since there is a good chance that a lot of those queries will never be answered as more and more agents are going the "no response = a no" route.

Then, there is waiting on submissions. These are better and worse. Better in that at least you know to expect a longer turn around time, so maybe the waiting won't get to you so badly at first. Worse because the stakes have just been raised. An acceptance here can mean signing with an agent. Which makes waiting for the end result even more difficult.

THEN, if you've made it past all that, you get to wait on publisher submissions. These are killer. Yes, you know the wait is going to be a bit longer, so again you might not worry too much at first. But then as the weeks, and months, tick by, it starts to get to you. The silent inbox. Your poor refresh button will need to be repaired at least twice. Because now the stakes are HUGE. And the waiting, therefore, is that much worse :)

AND THEN, if you've reached that glorious of all occasions, A BOOK DEAL, you might think you are home free. THE WAITING IS OVER!!!

Nope. You get to wait some more :D

See, rarely will you get to shout your awesome news from the rooftops right away. You'll have to wait to announce. Maybe days. More likely weeks. Or even months. You might be waiting on contracts or maybe your publisher wants to announce in conjunction with something else they've gone on, or maybe you want to wait until the PM announcement comes out or maybe negotiations on your contract are going back and forth. This waiting might seem like it's not so bad. After all, you've done it! You have a book deal! But sometimes the best things are the hardest secrets to keep :)

And so, my fine writer friends, we wait. On crits, on queries, on subs, on contracts, on announcements - we wait.

How do you handle the waiting? Has it taught you patience? Or...just that you don't like to wait? :D


Me..."patience is a virtue" has become my new mantra. It's not working well LOL

Blog Chain - Expect the Unexpected

Today is my turn on the ol' Blog Chain again, and this round's topic was chosen by the absolutely amazing Sarah, who wants to know:

What has been the most unexpected part of your writing journey up to this point? What has happened that you could never have predicted? Has it been a help or a hindrance?

Awesome question. And the short answer: EVERYTHING :D

Everything about my writing journey has been unexpected. From how much I truly love it, to how much work is involved, to how many rejections one really does get (my first novel numbered close to 200), to how long (and sometimes how fast) things can happen, to the absolutely amazing friends I've met along the way.

I started out with the very misguided misconception that I could write a book, edit it a few times (myself of course, after all, I have a masters in English, I shouldn't need help, right?), send it out, and get signed within days. My first attempt at querying didn't, unfortunately, break me of this thinking because I actually lucked out and received a few requests off my horrible query letter...and one was from none other than the Godmother of Romance herself, Roberta Brown (who wasn't even accepting queries at that time but who read mine and requested a full). 

Awesome, yes. Good for my ego, yes.  Realistic, no. I was rejected, of course, but with a very nice, personal letter that praised my writing. But, it didn't take too long to learn that querying doesn't usually go as smoothly and my journey was going to be a lot longer than I thought :)

So, yeah, really EVERYTHING about this journey has been unexpected....but I can't think of any of those things that has been a hindrance. Not even the never-ending waiting and crushing disappointment. All of it serves a purpose. I've grown incredibly close to some truly amazing people while we support each other through the lows and celebrate the highs. The long hours spent working and rewriting and shredding have served to hone my craft into something that's actually publishable. I wouldn't trade a second of it. It's helped make me the writer I am now and is shaping the even better writer I will become. 

Sometimes the unexpected can be fun - like signing with my NF agent within days of querying her, getting a request from an agent or publisher I thought I had NO shot with, or meeting another awesome writer bud. 

Really, I've come to expect the unexpected along this journey. You just can't plan for anything that's going to happen, because even the things you KNOW will happen usually happen in a completely unexpected way :) 

Bottom line....I've learned to just sit back and enjoy the ride :)

What has been the most unexpected part of YOUR journey?

Make sure you stop by the ever awesome Eric's to see his answer from yesterday, and stop by Margie's on Friday to find out what she didn't expect :)

 

Another cool post from the awesome Cole Gibsen :D

Had to take another brief moment to tell you that if you haven't read Cole Gibsen's post on Writing Like an X-Man, then you need to run, not walk, over to her blog. Seriously, one of the best posts EVER. :D

Owning My Insanity

First, for your Monday viewing pleasure:

Ever feel like that? :D Annnywho......

They say the definition of insanity is repeating the same action expecting different results...or something along those lines.

It got me thinking. Are we, my dear writers, insane? Sending out query after query, revising over and over, plowing on despite the rejections and accidental deletions and manuscript fails and revision dead ends....

Or are we just persistent? Driven? Determined? Plain ol' stubborn? :D

I'm inclined to think it's a mixture of all of the above. I think it takes a certain amount of insanity to put yourself through the wringer that is the publishing industry. But at the same time, that wringer weeds out those who have a true passion for what they are doing from those who might have been trying out a passing fancy.

Because, let's face it, unless you absolutely love what you are doing, this game can really get to you.

The thought of querying both chills and excites me. It's daunting, to say the least. A seemingly never ending cycle of emails and snail mails and requests and rejections. Incredible highs followed by crushing lows....we seem to be our own special type of adrenaline junky.

Do I go jumping off cliffs?

Heck no!! I send a query letter, baby!!

Do I race a car around a track at 200 miles an hour?

No way! I go through my manuscript one more time and send that puppy off to the agent that I just know is impatiently waiting by their inbox.

I HIT SEND!!! WOOOOOO!!! What a rush! 

Did I curl up in the fetal position and cry uncontrollably when that tree fell on my car a few years ago?

Pshaw! I save that sort of devastation for REAL tragedies...like when that agent who LOVED my manuscript decides they just don't love it as much as they should. (just kidding....or am I?) ;-D

So, are we insane? Maybe. But you know what I love about writers? At least the ones I know, the ones who are so determined to make it they stick to their guns no matter what delightful particles of nastiness may be poised to smack them in the face -

They own their insanity.

They embrace, rejoice in it, and with a smile on their face and a song in their heart they put yet one more query letter in the mail, knowing that THIS time, the answer will be different. Despite the rejections that are literally wallpapering their office, they KNOW that eventually, someone is going to say yes.

And when that next rejection comes in, they simply say:

and do it all over again.

They are my heroes :D

And if that's insanity, well count me in. Sounds like a grand plan to me :)

How about you? Are you a proud, card-carrying member of the Insanity Club?

How to Write a Non-Fiction Proposal

Ha ha!! It's not really that bad, I promise ;-D

Quote of the Day:

A book proposal is to publishing what the resume is to the job search...At its best, the proposal can function as a sophisticated sales brochure...The more impressive it is...the higher your advance is likely to be. That alone should be incentive enough for you to create the very best proposal you can...The proposal process must be taken seriously; it's the price of admission to being a published author.
~Jeff Herman, in the introduction to Write the Perfect Proposal: 10 Proposals that Sold and Why

I have had non-fiction book ideas for years, but one of the things that always stopped me from pursuing those ideas was the fact that I had to write a proposal in order to sell my idea. The non-fiction proposal scared me, intimidated me, had me cowering in the corner with my hands over my eyes.

I’d seen a few…they were huge! Like sixty-some pages long (with the sample chapters). They include sections on markets and platforms and competition and a bunch of other stuff that I had no clue how to even begin to write. I Googled a lot, but all the posts I had seen on writing these monstrosities confused me to no end. Even the ones that had clearly defined lists of the information I needed to include. I knew what I needed to do, theoretically, but actually putting that into action threw me into a vortex of confusion, despair, and terror.

So, I convinced myself I’d never be able to write a decent proposal. I occasionally worked on material for a non-fiction book that I knew would never see the light of day, but I let the idea of the proposal keep me from going after something I am really pretty good at doing.

And then a friend of mine, Carolyn, and I were talking one day. She is a soon-to-be published non-fiction author (who also writes fiction), and she encouraged me to quit letting the proposal beat me down and go for it. She recommended an awesome book, Jeff Herman’s Write the Perfect Proposal: 10 Proposals That Sold and Why, and sent me her own proposal as an example.

I was still scared to death and fairly sure I’d never make it out alive, but I looked over her proposal, read through the book many times, taking notes along the way, and finally sat down to draft my own proposal. It wasn’t easy; it is a ton of work…hard work. But, once I got into it, I realized that it wasn’t as scary as I had thought. It was doable. You just have to take it slowly, one section at a time.

While the Overview should be first, the rest of these sections can be moved around a bit. If you have an awesome platform, you could put the About the Author section first, etc. I've just listed them in the order I had them in my proposal.

Section One: Overview

This is your hook. In this section, you briefly describe what your book is about. Make it good, interesting, catchy. It shouldn’t be too long (the overviews I have seen were mostly less than two pages, in some cases only a couple paragraphs. Mine was about two and a half pages, double-spaced).

Ask yourself these questions:

What is my book about?
What makes it different from the other books out there? (be brief, you can go into more detail on this in the section on competition)
Why does the world need my book?
Who will read it? (you don’t need to go into detail here, save that for the market section – but in general, who will the audience be).

In my case, my book is a handbook for writing essays, papers, and poetry. Well, there are a lot of books out there that do this. So, I was sure to mention why my book was different.

My first paragraph introduced the issue at hand…writing assignments such as these can be difficult. If I could have found them, I probably would have listed a statistic or two on how many students fail their Language Arts classes. Good, solid facts and statistics are a nice addition, but not totally necessary.

This also depends on your book, though. Carolyn’s upcoming book is a guide to help writers include realistic information on psychology in their work. She had several sources that cited good percentages, statistics, and quotations describing how often this type of information is used in books, film, and television and how often it is inaccurate. In her proposal, the statistics worked well. In mine, everyone knows that there are a lot of students in our country and a lot of them need help in English class…statistics aren’t really necessary to help prove that.

My second paragraph went into further detail…I mentioned that in my experience, people who are already confused become more so when confronted with guidebooks that are so technically written they do nothing more than make a bad situation worse.

My third paragraph described why my book solved this problem by describing what my book is about and going into a little detail about the tone and format of my book. And then I added in a bulleted list illustrating exactly why my book is the perfect writing guide and what a reader will get out of it. Remember, be confident! An agent or editor won’t have confidence in your work if you don’t! And remember, keep it brief. You can expound on most of this stuff in later sections.

One of the reasons my overview was a bit longer than normal was because I also included a few quotations from educators and school psychologists who had read my sample chapters and gave me their endorsement. These could have been included in another section in the proposal (in fact, my agent is having me include an entire endorsement section in my proposal for when we submit it to publishers), but for the initial querying to agents, I included them right up front in the overview.

Section Two: Market

Here is where you go into detail about your audience. This is one of the sections that intimidated me the most, but ended up being one of the easiest to write. Maybe it is the title…MARKET…it just sounds scary :D But really, all you are doing here is listing who would be interested in reading your book. And you already know this because you probably had an audience in mind when you wrote the book. Brainstorm every possible market for your book, then list them in order of importance or size.

For my book, my main, or primary, market is educational. The largest audience for my book will be students, from junior high through college. I added some statistics here about how many learning disabled students there are in the United States because this is not common knowledge and my book will be very helpful for the learning disabled.

My secondary market is another division of educational – homeschooling parents. There are a lot of parents who homeschool their children (I added a statistic here to show exactly how many), and these parents need books to educate their children.

I also listed a possible third market – it’s more of a long shot, but it is a possibility, so I put it in there. This would be writers. Freelance bloggers, writers, etc could find my book useful if they wanted to make sure the articles they were writing were technically sound, or beginning poets could use it to get all the rules right.

I added statistics here to show how many freelance writers there are in the United States, how that job group has grown in the last few years and mentioned the projected growth.

Section Three: Competition

There will almost always be competition for your book and there is no point trying to pretend otherwise. Editors and agents are fully aware there are other books out there that will be competing with yours, so you might as well do your homework.

This section is where you can help illustrate why your book is different from those already on the shelves. I started my section by saying, “Though there are many handbooks and textbooks available that teach essay, paper, and poetry writing skills, many prove inadequate to the task.” I briefly described why and listed a few books in the same category as my book and pointed out why mine was better.

For example, you could say, “This title by so and so is good in that it does this or that. However, it does not do this, this, and this. My book does.”

I did this for a couple titles and then just made a list of several titles (there are a lot in my category, so I just picked a few). List the title, the author, the publisher, the year published, and the current selling price for each competitive title.

Section Four: About the Author

This is where you talk yourself up, toot your own horn, list everything and anything that illustrates how wonderful you are and why you are the best person to write your book. This is where you talk about your platform, how you can help sell your book. Do you have degrees, personal experience, professional experience? Do you give workshops, speeches, or classes on your subject? Have you been previously published? If so, list your books, their publication date, and your publisher, along with any other pertinent information like if your books were bestsellers or won any awards. Do you have access to radio shows, blogs, websites, conferences, etc, where you can promote your book? Are you related to the President of the United States, sister of Bill Gates, best friends with Brad Pitt or someone else that will be able to help you get this book out in the world?

This was another section that intimidated me, because my platform is pretty weak. I have the degrees and the personal experience necessary to make me an expert on my subject. But I don’t have the professional experience. I am not a teacher, I don’t speak at conferences or conventions, I have not been previously published (well, in a few Chicken Soup for the Soul books, but not in anything that would help me out in this arena).

But that is okay. Yes, it helps tremendously if you have a strong platform. To give you the honest truth, a lot of agents or editors may reject you if your platform isn’t strong enough. They like to publish books when the author has a guaranteed way of making a lot of sales. That is why celebrities can publish whatever kind of crap they want – because they have a built-in audience guaranteed to buy the book.

Definitely do what you can to build your platform before and after you write your book – but if you don’t have a large platform, don’t let it stop you. There are things you can do to help with that. And if you have an awesome book, it will sell itself.

Despite my weak platform, I knew I had a great book idea, I knew I could pull it off, and I knew if someone would just read what I had written, they’d love it. And I was right, they did. But, because my platform is so weak, I am finishing my manuscript before submitting to publishers and am including that endorsement section in my proposal (quotes from people who DO have the right background who are willing to stand behind my book), where with someone with a solid platform might be able to submit their book right away.

In any case, this is the section to say whatever wonderful things about yourself that you can – most importantly, things that will help illustrate why you are the right person to be writing your book.

Section Five: Promotion

This is where you list everything that you can do to help promote your book. Don’t list anything here unless you are sure you can do it. You can list things like:

Websites or blogs (yours or others) that will promote your book
Other avenues where you can promote it yourself such as radio shows, television shows, conferences you often speak at…if you are teacher who can pick your own textbooks and you can use your book in your class, you can mention that here
If you can create media kits, flyers, newsletters, etc or have other ways of advertising your book, list them here
If you are independently wealthy or have a grant or some other type of funding to help advertise your book, list it

Basically, this section is where you want to illustrate everything and anything you can do to advertise and promote your book.

Section Six: Chapter Outline and Synopsis

Now, I’ve seen this done a few different ways. Some people will list their Table of Contents in the Overview, or include a highly annotated Table of Contents in lieu of an outline or synopsis. Many I saw (and this is what I did) listed the Table of Contents (marking which chapters were included in the proposal as sample chapters) and then went through the chapters of the book, giving a brief overview or synopsis of each chapter.

My book has twenty-five chapters, so I was a bit hesitant to do this, but it didn’t end up being a huge production. You don’t have to go into great detail. Just briefly describe what each chapter will include. Each of my chapters includes a How To section and examples, so I stated that at the beginning of the section, and then in the chapter abstracts, I just wrote a paragraph or two on my chapters.

For example, as my book is a handbook for writing assignments, the chapters are broken down by the different types of essays and poetic forms that are out there. Chapter Four is on Critical Essays, Chapter Sixteen on Ballads, and so on. So for each chapter, I wrote a paragraph or two describing what Critical essays or ballads are (basically what I put for my intro of each chapter in the actual book), and left it at that, since I had already pointed out that each chapter would have its own How To section and specific examples.

For your own proposals, just briefly describe the content of your chapters.

Section Seven: Sample Chapters

Here is where you will include two or three of the actual chapters of your book. Now, you do not have to have the book finished in order to get signed by an agent or sell your book to a publisher. That is the fun with non-fiction books. You can sell them based on an idea.

However, you do have to have at least a couple chapters (two is the norm) so the agent or editor can get an idea of what your book will look like when it is finished.

When you are finished with your proposal, I highly suggest having at least one person look it over for basic proofreading and to see if it hooks them. A proposal is like a huge, blown-up query…you still need to hook that agent or editor into wanting your book. Even more so, because there usually isn’t a finished manuscript for them to request. They sign you or buy your book based solely (most of the time) on your proposal. But don’t let that scare you! Present your book (and yourself) in the best way you can, polish up those sample chapters, and send it out :)

And that’s it! Yes, it’s a LOT of work, and there is a lot of research involved, especially if you choose to include statistics or quotations in addition to your competition titles. And I highly recommend looking at Jeff Herman's book (or any other book you can find on writing proposals, but I like his especially because he includes annotated proposals as examples). Several agent's websites and blogs have posts on this topic and if you can get a hold of some example proposals to look at, that is always a good idea. I'm a very visual person, so looking at a finished product helps me understand how to get there myself :)

If you take it slowly, one section at a time, it really isn’t nearly as intimidating. Most of these sections are no more than a page long, some less than that. I think my largest section was two pages long…until you get to the Outline, Chapter Abstracts, and Sample Chapters of course :)

So just focus on the small chunks, complete it with a title page and Proposal Table of Contents, and before you know it, you’ll have a finished proposal ready to ship out to agents and editors :D Good luck!!