(This is a reprint of a blog I wrote when I first decided I wanted to publish a book.)
Why I am Starting this Blog (Jan. 3, 2014)
I’ve got to fess up to a serious addiction – I am totally hooked on conquering long-distance hiking and biking trails. I’ve bicycled from Pittsburgh to Washington DC, from Montreal to Quebec, across the state of New York along the Erie Canal, and across most of Europe along the Danube River. Last summer that addiction began to spread to hiking with a month long month long hike across Spain along the Camino de Santiago. My adventures keep getting longer and a bit crazier. Now, to feed my adventure addiction, I am doing something much, much more terrifying and difficult: I’m writing my first book. It’s a non-fiction business book I have been kicking around for a while and finally decided I had to get it out of my head. Don’t worry, it’s not a memoir or anything like that – I don’t think even I would find it interesting enough to buy. It’s about a leadership style I have learned over the years that has worked pretty well for me. I’m told the journey for a first time author is as long and hard as the chances of success are remote. It will make the physical challenges of hiking and biking hundreds of miles seem relaxing I think. When I did my hike and bike across Europe last year, I Facebook blogged everyday to my friends and many seemed to enjoy it. I know the feedback they gave me every day helped push me on through the sore muscles, twisted ankle, and blisters. So I figure I need all the help I can get with this first time author journey, so I am going to live blog this as well. Hopefully I get some luck and make it to the finish line. Come join me!
Sharing the Book Idea for the First Time (Jan. 11, 2014)
My 20+ year career has centered on doing two basic activities (1) analyzing things and (2) leading people. Over time, the two have blended in with each other. As I had more and more experience leading people, my analyst self looked for patterns and root causes in the situations I found myself facing as a leader. My inner voice started a conversation with itself: “This difficult situation I am facing with leading Joe right now reminds me of a situation I faced with leading Jane two years ago. If I apply the lessons I learned in leading Jane to this difficult situation with Joe, that would be a lot better than starting from scratch.” “And if I can figure out what makes these two situations so similar, I can more easily identify similar situations like that in the future so I could apply the right lessons learned.” “And if I could identify what these root causes are and look for those in other team members, I could probably anticipate problems and apply those lessons learned ahead of time.” So I set about to identifying these common root causes and organizing them into a framework. I started with a simple picture that soon found its way into PowerPoint. Then the PowerPoint turned into a Word document to fit all the words around the picture describing the concept. By the time the Word document turned into ten pages or so, I figured I might actually have an outline of a book. Wow, how did that happen? Just one problem – I had no idea what a book idea looks like or how you turn it into an actual book. But luckily I had a trusted friend and colleague who did by the name of Mike. Mike had published his first book a couple of years ago and had found quite a bit of success and learned a lot of lessons along the way. I sent him the outline with an introduction along the lines of “this is probably nothing, but do you think there is a book here and, if so, want to help me?” That was three days ago, and now I just got back the reply I was hoping to hear — “Yes and yes.” So a journey begins. Hopefully both a book and I emerge on the other side.
Learning How Book Publishing Works (Jan. 15, 2014)
Mike and I found some time to chat about the book today. My starting question was “how does this work?” He told me to buckle in for a few minutes while he walked through the whole experience. Here is what I caught from the fire hose of information that followed through the phone. (1) The process starts with a literary agent. There are a relatively small set (maybe a dozen or so) of literary agents in this niche of the business book world that hold the keys to the publishing kingdom. They have become experts at knowing what the publishers are looking for and being able to quickly tell if they see it. Because they have built a reputation for doing just that, publishers rely on them as gatekeepers between them and aspiring authors. If you can’t get an agent interested in your concept, it will never even get in front of a publisher. For that service, agents typically take 15% of the money an author gets. (2) The pitch to publishers comes in the form of a Proposal, which has several parts. (3) First is the Precis, a word so new to me I can’t even figure out how to type the foreign symbol on one of its letters. The Precis is a fancy name for a very short summary (one page) of the core concept of the book and why it is useful. The next part is a description of the author and the platform they can use to market the book once it does get printed. Could the author prove to readers that they know what they are writing about? And can the author advertise the book to a lot of people to help drive sales? Basically, their way of saying ?I need to know that you can both chop down the tree and there will be people there to hear it fall before I give your lumberjack-wannabe butt a lift to the forest.? (4) The next part is the chapter outline. You number and title each chapter and write a brief description of what they contain. This is the bulk of the work because you not only have to have your concept fully developed but you have to get the flow of the story right too in smaller pieces. (5) Finally, the last part is the writing sample. This is typically one full chapter of the book to show that you can actually write well. (6) Once your literary agent has a complete proposal, they present it around to the publishing houses they know are most likely interested in your topic. In the ideal world, one or more come back with an offer to pick it up that includes an advance on royalties, deadlines and other financial terms. (7) Financial terms center on royalty rates, which are set on wholesale, not list, price and are typically tiered based on volume. The first 5000 copies earn the author 15% of wholesale price, the next 5000 copies 17% and runs above that pay out 20%. You should note that your agent?s 15% cut comes out of all of those, so author?s net take is 12.75%, 14.45%, and 17%, respectively. And remember that the advance you get, maybe $10-20K or so is called an advance because it is just pre-payment of royalties you earn. If you don?t sell enough books, you won?t see any more. To sum up ? don?t quit your day job. (8) Once you sign an agreement, the real writing work actually begins and you will be on deadline. A whole new slew of people will be ripping apart your work ? the acquiring editor, the copy editor and at least one other type of editor whose label I cant read from my notes because Mike was talking so fast. This whole process took about 14 months for Mike with his book, which is pretty fast, and he signed with an elite publishing house. It took me a moment to notice that the fire hose of information had finally stopped. My hand was cramped from writing and my head was spinning. What exactly am I signing up for? Am I really up for this? Do you have to be crazy to do this? “Hello. You still there?” Mike’s voice on the other end of the phone snapped me out of my stupor. I hesitated a moment and replied, “Well, we better get started.”
Enter: The Agent (Jan. 22, 2014)
“Sideways” is one of my all-time favorite movies. The scene where Paul Giamatti’s character goes beserk and sloppily chugs the spit bucket of red wine at the tasting room of a winery is a classic. Do you remember what caused him to go beserk? It was talking to his literary agent. Today, I communicated with a literary agent for the first time. No wine buckets were spilled in the process, but I am going to refer our agent as Miles going forward in homage to my favorite fictional author. Miles represented Mike for his book and was key to getting it published. So when Mike suggested we see if Miles thought we had a good book concept, I instantly agreed. Mike and I spent the next several days polishing up the simple outline I had so we could get Miles something to react to. Mike emailed it to Miles under the subject line “Next book” last Friday. Miles replied surprisingly quickly with a “I’ll get back to you next week. Have a good weekend.” I wonder how quickly – or even if – Miles would have responded if I had sent the email cold to him. I checked my email inbox about 100 times a day for the next several days. Today, we finally got a reply from Miles – “I like this quite a bit, and think it is definitely worth developing… Let’s discuss.” I’m not sure what I was hoping or expecting to hear, but this sounded pretty good. I don’t think I will be chugging a spit bucket of red wine … at least not today.
Agent Feedback (Jan. 23, 2014)
Mike and I just got off of a conference call with Miles the agent. It was great to hear he liked the outline and said it had good potential worth pushing. He gave some very helpful feedback too. First, he said we have to decide what our “voice” would be in our writing. Are we going to use “we” or be non-personal. Whichever way, we had to be consistent. Then he pointed out the part he thought was the weakest part. It was exactly the place that Mike and I thought he would. He reacted to our working titles and gave us some tips on what makes a good title and subtitle. We left the call with a bunch of “to do’s” and an agreement to get something back to Miles soon.
More Agent Feedback (Jan. 26, 2014)
The phone call with Miles sparked a new email conversation between Mike and Miles on Mike’s first book sales update. When the conversation touched on our book, Mike looped me in. (Seeing the earlier part of the email conversation about tracking sales of Mike’s first book via a portal for agents to check retail sailes was an interesting peek behind the curtain for me.) Miles reaffirms that he likes our concept with an “I like this idea a lot” which brings a big smile to my face. My logical self knows that tossing out positive affirmation to aspiring authors must be a regular task for agents – like what lawn sprinklers do with water. That said, it still makes me smile. Their conversation goes to ideas to further monetize the concept. (Ok, maybe Miles really does see something here if he is already thinking of that.) Could we offer additional training on the concept in a mass market way? Miles throws out a couple examples we should think about as ideas to emulate. One is a new one I have never heard of. The other book is a household name that I still see in every airport bookstore. Now this is getting interesting. If only this book could write itself…
Formalizing our Co-Author Agreement (Jan. 27, 2014)
Mike and I decide that we should probably formalize our partnership terms on the book to avoid any confusion down the road. We are both on the same page about what partnership means, but it sounds like a good idea anyway. Jointly creating intellectual property does create some unique questions worth answering (e.g., what happens to the intellectual property rights if one partner drops out part way and the other wants to continue). Besides he has an old coauthorship agreement draft he did for a past project that can be an easy starting point. He will mark that up and get it to me. From the first time I shared the idea with him, I said I wanted to be true partners – 50/50 on everything. Sure, the original idea is mine but I know that Mike brings a lot to the table that I lack that complements the idea. Mike’s experience successfully publishing a book opens doors and helps us avoid rookie author mistakes. He also has built a great marketing platform with his thousands of readers of his book and business blog. He is a prolific writer how has learned to communicate business topics in a compelling way. Finally, he is a great and smart guy I have been partnering with on other things and really enjoy working with. Overall, a no-brainer. I do have exactly one thing I would like to not split right down the middle and I’m a bit uncomfortable saying so. One of our names has to go first in the author line and, for some reason, it would mean a lot for me to be first. Before I even ask, Mike has already taken care of that in the draft agreement, noting me as “author” and him as “coauthor” with my name going first. Everything else seems pretty common sense and I send it off to an attorney specializing in copyright law to give me an expert read. (I use eLance.com to bid out my legal projects and have been very happy with the service.) We agree to finalize any tweaks after incorporating any changes from the attorneys. I’m not 100% sure this book will ever produce a penny of revenue, but now it is incurring some real expenses. This is getting real.
Work Intrudes (Feb. 14, 2014)
It’s been over two weeks since our flurry of activity pushing the book and connecting with Miles. We haven’t made as much progress in these two weeks as we did during the last two days of that flurry. It’s for a good reason though … other work has popped up that has distracted both Mike and me. We both have our own management consulting and training businesses and we partner together frequently. In the last two weeks, we have had several new potential client leads come in all at once and putting together proposals to respond takes some time. Prospective clients are always a priority, so the book has taken a back seat. It is a good problem to have, but hopefully we can find some time to continue pushing forward to a proposal Miles can start marketing. Oh, and also Miles emailed today to ask for an ETA for the updated proposal. It is a good reminder … and a nice validation that he must think there is some good potential here.
Proposal 0.0 (Feb. 17, 2014)
The gentle nudge from Miles has spurred us to finish up our edits to the outline and get it back to him for his thoughts. Miles gives us a few suggestions and tells us we need to start translating the outline to a more formal proposal. Mike sends a copy of his final proposal from his first book and we decide to use that as a starting point. We need to translate the 5-10 page outline into a 30-50 page proposal. We have our work cut out for us. Kind of intimidating.
Good Distractions, but Distractions (Feb. 28, 2014)
We’ve had more good distractions. A couple of other potential clients needing proposals. Some family and vacation. Excuses, excuses. Bottom line is we haven’t made a ton of progress in building out the big proposal format. Most of the progress we have made in the last couple of weeks has been around setting up the process through which we will work together. Mike set up a Dropbox folder for us. First time I am using it and it is very useful. We also set up a weekly meeting to check in, although we have skipped the last few because of competing priorities.
Mike: Slammed (March 15, 2014)
I finally got back to working on the proposal and check in with Mike. His reply back – “Slammed. Will review/revert soon. Sorry for the delay.” The terseness of his message reinforces the content. Mike is a workaholic (he would admit so) so I don’t doubt for a second that he is slammed on other valuable things. I just find that pushing the ball alone takes a little wind out of my sails. I feel like I am playing tennis with a wall – the only thing I get out is what I put in. The adrenaline I felt in January is kind of running low. I start to wonder if this was a crazy idea after all. No hard feelings, just more like a check back into reality that feels like an adrenaline hangover.
Victor: Slammed (April 3, 2014)
I am not sure what happened to the second half of March. A freak cold snap in DC froze my pipes, which meant I started a new job of babysitting plumbers in my house. My parents’ 50th wedding anniversary and an impromptu family reunion in DC meant I was hosting a big party. More client requests came in. Spring and Cherry Blossoms. Nationals baseball season opening. A mayoral race to help with. Whatever it was, the last couple of weeks were quite event filled, but did not translate to a lot of progress on the book.
Restart (May 5, 2014)
The book proposal has moved exactly zero inches forward over the last several weeks. Lots of excuses, none of them great. I was overseas on a hiking trip for a couple of weeks. Mike continued to be slammed with work. Etc. So I reached back out to Mike today and asked if we should restart the book or should we take our lack of progress as a sign that maybe it wasn’t meant to be. We both decided to get back to it and schedule a call to get us going again.
Sometimes a Break Can Be Good (May 22, 2014)
We have made some nice progress over the last couple of weeks. In fact, setting it aside seems to have had some big benefits. First, re-reading it confirmed for me that there was a good concept here worth completing. Second, it made it much clearer what should be changed and gave some fresh ideas on how to restructure. We have cranked quite a bit on it. The proposal is up to almost 40 pages and it is getting much tighter. Much tighter. I am officially excited again and getting eager to get it to the next step.
Coffee with an Author (May 28, 2014)
I had coffee today with a neighbor of mine who just published his first book. The whole time I was meeting with him I was thinking to myself “when can I call myself an ‘author’?”. He cracked the top 10 of the Washington Post’s non-fiction best seller list. It was interesting to hear about his experience. When he asked about where we were and when we started, I felt a little embarrassed about our big delay over the previous couple of months. I told him we started at the New Year, secured an agent who wanted to represent us, and have our proposal up to about 40 pages. His reply – “Wow, that is really fast.” That was a surprise. It was a nice reminder about how picking the right partner so early was a very smart move.
Finally Hitting ‘Send” Again (June 2, 2014)
I love the book. I hate the book. Well, to clarify, I am really happy with where we are with the proposal draft. We seem to be accelerating in finding ways to tighten it every time we exchange edits. I am starting to think people actually might want to buy this book when it gets printed. Yes, I said “when” as I am now getting very eager to get to the next stage with it. At the same time, I am hating the book a bit because I am now at the point where I have read it so many times I am having a hard time letting it go back to Miles (remember, he is the agent) for his feedback. I keep thinking “what if we added this or changed that” but then realize that at some point you just need to sew up the patient up. We set a goal to send it to Miles by the end of last week. It was ready, but we decide to sleep on it over the weekend. So today was the day to send it off. I sent Miles a heads up on Saturday that we would be getting something to him in the next few days. My purpose with that was to (a) remind him who I was after such a long gap so my email didn’t get lost in his inbox, (b) let him know to set some time aside because going through the 40 page document does take some time, and (c) to commit myself to getting it out. I reread the proposal one more time. I found no type-os and changed exactly one word. I resaved and then attached it to an email. My temptation was to write a long explanation of what changed since last time, what we think is good, what we know we need to work on, etc. etc.. But I resisted that temptation and simply said “As mentioned. We are eager to get your feedback.” under the subject line “Revised Book Proposal”. For the first time in months, I feel like the ball is out of my court and it feels good. The bad part is that I am now playing a waiting game. The proposal has grown a lot since Miles last saw it. Would he still think it is a good idea or has he since come to his senses? What if all the work to date was for naught? Was I crazy to think I could write a book? And I wait…
The Agent Responds (June 3, 2014)
I have checked my email inbox approximately 600 times in the 26 hours since I sent the proposal to Miles. Is my inbox working? Am I going to be crushed or elated when he does respond? Mercifully, the waiting game ended at 1:41pm today with his reply calling this “a very strong proposal” and asking for a conference call to go over feedback. The three of us find a time to conference call on Thursday afternoon. So I will go with “cautiously elated” instead of “crushed” for the next two days.
Monday is Going to Be A Big Day (June 5, 2014)
Mike and I just got off of a conference call with our literary agent (Miles). It had been a few months since we last chatted on the phone with him about the book. Miles started off with some nice comments such as “this is really quite good” and “reading this proposal, I would feel confident you know the book you are going to write.” Nice to hear. Nice to hear. Miles had a couple of tweaks for the title and asked us to add a “Market” section to the proposal. That basically points out that the intended target audience for the book are current managers and people aspiring to be managers and looking for things to learn to help them get there. The biggest surprise for me was that the publisher who published Mike’s first book has a right of first refusal on his next book, and that covers a coauthored book too. They get 60 days to make an offer before, although they probably won’t take that long. I am viewing this as a pleasant surprise, as the publisher in question is a very well-regarded one. And because they published Mike’s first book, we don’t need to include a whole chapter as a writing sample. Nice to hear. Nice to hear. We set a goal to make the final edits and send it in to that publisher on Monday. T minus 4 days until we get to a whole new step. This is feeling a lot more real now.
Final(?) Proposal in Agent’s Hands (June 9, 2014)
Spent a few hours — ok, all day — today writing the missing ‘Market and Competition’ section of the proposal. Most of that time was spent browsing Amazon.com for all the books that touch on our leadership/team management topic. Turns out “browsing” is a synonym for “wandering like Charlie through a Willy Wonka factory of leadership/team management books.” It is amazing how many people have been able to translate their thoughts into books. Having come this far, I have a new appreciation for all their efforts. Looking over all those titles doubles down on my thought that there is a market for helpful leadership books. It also makes me feel like we have a fresh approach that is more grounded in experience than theory. Blah, blah, blah. I send it to Mike to get his thoughts on my crackerjack Market and Competiion summary:. “Looks great… Send? You?ve got the honors sir”,” I hit “Send” to Miles. If he likes our “Market and Competition” analysis summary, the whole proposal goes to the publisher. If he doesn?t, we have some work to do. Stay tuned.
Agent Submits, Now I Wait (June 10, 2014)
Miles, the agent, replies to update to the proposal “Looks right … will send to publisher today.” Now, to quote the great Tom Petty, “The waiting is the hardest part…” The publisher has up to 60 days to reply with their right of first refusal. One thing that makes this different (harder? easier?) than the typical author submission is that I know that the right people will see this proposal. Between having a great agent and a great, proven co-author, it will get in the right hands. That is wonderful but has a downside. If it gets no interest, I won’t have the excuse to tell myself that my work is great but just undiscovered. Maybe unappreciated, but not undiscovered. Weirdly makes me feel more exposed than if I were coming in cold as an aspiring first time author.
Publisher Responds (June 19, 2014)
After a week of waiting, we finally got a response from the publisher today: an editor wants to chat on the phone. I am taking that as a good sign, as they probably don’t waste their time on the phone to let people know what a waste of time it was to read their proposal . We are scheduled for next Wednesday afternoon. Another week of waiting, but now I can at least feel the words of the great Lloyd Christmas(*) as wind in my sails: “So you’re telling me there’s a chance.” (*) Christmas is one of two lead protagonists in the classic Greek tragedy “Dumb and Dumber”.
Just Finished Writing? the Coauthorship Agreement (June 24, 2014)
Mike and I wanted to avoid any problems down the road by formalizing our coauthor partnership structure for this book. The easy part is we are completely on the same page that we are 50/50 equals and we have built a great working relationship on other things in the past. The only small difference that I vainly wanted was that my name would appear first in the author credit line. That was the easy part, but the devil is certainly in the details on things. There are a bunch of scenarios to plan for and agree to how we handle them up front. Some are nice to think about: What if the market begs us to write sequel after sequel? What if we sell a lot of training and speaking engagements based on the work? What if George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Frances Ford Coppola beg us to let them turn it into the next film blockbuster? I can already hear that deep movie preview voice introducing our film … “In a world starving for a new ‘leadership in the workplace’ book…”. I wonder if Brad Pitt is available to play me. Should I have them remove all the green M&Ms from my trailer? … OK, got carried away a bit there, but you get the picture. The wild part is thinking about some other scenarios that are not quite as fun to think about but smart to plan for. What if one of us can’t hit our deadlines? What if one of us just goes AWOL? Very unlikely but worth covering. Good thing is that Mike had an agreement he had drafted by an attorney for a previous effort that we could use as a starting point. After my attorney reviews and we make some minor tweaks over several review cycles, we finally got it finalized. Today. Now I am ready to start writing and editing prose aimed at real people, not attorneys. “Herein, we shall make all reasonable efforts to never use the word “Herein”, in electronic or hard copy format, in The Work…” OK, now back to being nervously excited about our first live call with a potential publisher tomorrow afternoon.
Today’s Call with a Publisher (June 25, 2014)
I just got off a conference call with a Senior Editor at the publisher we submitted the proposal to. In keeping with the Sideways movie theme, I will call her Maya. While nothing definitive came out of the call, it does sound like she is interested in pursuing it further. Maya started the conversation by saying she “greatly enjoyed” reading our proposal. Then she asked a bunch of questions about how we came up with it, how long it would take us to write, and how we would help push sales. Interestingly, she didn’t have any big suggestions for changes. She did ask us how wedded we are to the working title and we went back and forth on that a bit. After about 40 minutes, Maya wound up the conversation with two things that I take as a nice sign. First, she said the proposal passed the “is the content worthy and is the message fresh?” test she uses to review proposals. (Nice to hear, nice to hear.) And second, she asked us to get her one additional piece of information … by Friday. (Very nice to hear. Very nice to hear.) I really like the fact that she had a quick deadline, which suggests she has some specific next steps in mind. So all in all, my first conversation with a real live publisher has me smiling. We didn’t leave with any definitive next steps or timing, but it seems like we just got over another hurdle. Stay tuned.
Can I Take ‘Pocket Veto’ for $100, Alex? (August 15, 2014)
The waiting game with the publisher ended on Wednesday. Emphasis on THE publisher. My agent Miles emailed me on Monday to say that the 60 day “right of first refusal” window for Publisher A ended at midnight. The weird part was that it didn’t end with either an offer or a refusal … it just ended. Despite such a good initial response from the buyer at the publisher, they didn’t come through with an offer. Miles gave them a friendly reminder that the window was closing, but even that didn’t elicit a reply. Miles said he has never seen this before and he has worked with them for a while. He has seen them make offers or give polite “thanks, but no thanks” but he has never seen them let a window go by without one of those replies. He was pretty perplexed. He suspected something must be going on there behind the scenes and our book proposal is caught in it. Hmm… Well, at least I avoided a potential “it’s not you, it’s me” conversation with the publisher. So, to recap, it looks like my proposal was so bad it broke book publishing. OK, enough feeling bad. You know how the saying goes – when one door closes … or doesn’t close … or stays slightly ajar … or disappears … another door opens. More accurately, several other doors open. One reason Miles was so eager to talk was that he wants to pitch the book to the handful of other big publishers. Despite the pocket veto from Publisher A, he is still quite excited about our proposal. In fact, my co-author who published a book through Miles a couple of years ago told me that Miles seemed a lot more excited by our book proposal than his first one that did get published. That was nice to hear. So we have a clear next step — we shop our proposal around to the other handful of big publishers. Hopefully we get an offer, but at this point, I would be happy to at least get a ding (“no thanks” letter to let me know this is really happening. Because late August is exactly the worst time to shop a proposal, Miles said we wait until right after Labor Day, which is a great time. When I asked if we needed to rework the proposal in light of our first non-bite, Miles replied with a quick “no”, which was a nice thing to hear to reaffirm that he still likes our chances. Stay tuned?
A New Nibble for 60,000 Words (September 10, 2014)
As promised, Miles sent out our 40 page book proposal to the other leading publishing houses a few days after Labor Day. We got our first new bite on Monday from another big, well-known publisher. They asked for our targeted word count and delivery day for a complete draft. Using our best guess from Mike’s first book, we said 60,000 thousand words. (Do you remember when our high school assignments of 500 words seemed daunting?) We said end of January as our deadline to finish the draft, as we both have a lot going on between now and the end of the year and want to give ourselves some breathing room. It will be interesting to see if they come back with an offer. It would be another nice confirmation that there is potential here. It might also be a nice way to get our first publisher to come through with an offer. Stay tuned and wish us luck.
Hoping Three is my Lucky Number (September 11, 2014)
We just got interest from another big, household name, publisher. That now makes three. And three is my lucky number. The buyer at the publishing house wants to talk with us on the phone tomorrow. He told Miles that he plans to pitch it internally next week and just wanted to get to know us a bit before doing that. Interestingly enough, this same buyer made an offer for Mike’s first book a few years ago, so hopefully that is a good sign. Stay tuned…
You Had Me at ‘Singapore’ (September 13, 2014)
I just got off our conference call with a senior editor at a very well-known publishing house. (If I recall correctly, I think their name is on a skyscraper in NYC.) The senior editor – I’ll call him “Ford” – was a very nice guy who had worked with Mike and Miles before. Ford started the conversation by saying our proposal was “really well put together” and our “approach is really unique” and he is planning to present it to his Editorial Board next Wednesday. The Editorial Board is the group made up of the Publisher and Associate Publisher and representatives from Marketing, Sales, International, etc.. They are the governance body that can authorize him to make us an offer. He walked us through the process that it would go through after we finish the manuscript – he edits, copy editor edits, typesetting, then production. If we finish manuscript by end of January, it should hit bookshelves in October, which is a prime time for marketing new books. He said they would do a global launch through their operations in Singapore, London, Canada and Australia. He said foreign translations could work too if demand merits. Wait a second… did he say Singapore? OK, now I am totally getting ahead of myself and, when none of that actually happens, I am setting myself up for some serious disappointment. And some serious embarrasment as well, since I decided to share news real-time on this blog for some crazy reason. The only question I had for Ford was whether he liked our working title or not. His reply: “Ninety percent of the time, I ask the author for a new title before I take it to the Editorial Board. I think your title is strong and I’m keeping it as is.” Oh well, after we got off of the call, Miles let us know the other big publisher who expressed interest is pushing it up their management chain and we should hear something back from them next week as well. So this week ends with a big smile on my face. I hope I have a reason (or maybe even two reasons) to smile next Friday. If not, my smile might be upside down.
“I’m gonna write a book someday” (October 9, 2014)
Maybe You Can Judge a Book By Its Cover (October 18, 2014)
I Bought A Book I Haven’t Even Written (October 29, 2014)
I’m driving around running some errands yesterday when my cell phone rings. I see it is Mike on the screen, but I am driving so I keep my eyes on the road and let him go to voicemail. He does. Then he calls right again. Hmm. This could be interesting. I wait until I park and call him back instead of checking voicemail. “Hey. Amazon just posted our book for pre-order sale,” Mike jumped right in. “You gotta do some stuff pronto.” One thing I am very much looking forward to doing as a first time author is to wander into a brick and mortar Barnes and Noble store and finding my book on the shelf. Since that won’t happen until the book is actually done, that is a summer 2015 thing. What I didn’t think about is that online bookstores can … and apparently do … post the book for pre-orders as soon as they get the catalog of upcoming book releases from publishers. Apparently that quick turnaround homework that the publisher gave us right after we signed was to do the short description of the book. I really didn’t think that the words I jotted down on my Mac would be up on Amazon a week or two later. This thing just got even more real. “They have an author bio page up for you but it is blank,” Mike continued. “You need to post a bio and picture asap. You also need to get set up as an Amazon affiliate so you get links to that page that have a referral code embedded so you get a commission for any sales that come from your links to the book. It actually ends up being a nice little income stream, because if someone buys a copy of your book from your link and then they buy a big ticket item in that same session, you get a commission for all of it.” He also told me that pre-order sales are especially important because they all roll up to count as your first week’s sales, which is what can get you on bestseller lists. So if you are interested in my book, may I suggest a pre-order and maybe some jewelry to go along with it?
Bookwriting: 95% Authorship, 5% OtherShi?p (October 29, 2014)
Yesterday’s surprise posting of our book on a large internet retailer (I will henceforth refer to as Rubicon.com) was fun. My scurry to learn how to become a Rubicon affiliate to promote the book was kind of a fun challenge, albeit a total urgent distraction. It’s not like I am going to get rich off of Rubicon’s commision rates for referrals, but I really look forward to getting the daily data back on how many sales my book is getting. So imagine my surprise when I get an email tonight from Rubicon telling me my application to become an affiliate had been denied but giving no reason. They were nice enough to include a link to their Affiliate Operating Agreement for my reference. I never never never click on links from emails I am not expecting. But I was so surprised, I did. Good news is that it did take me to the Rubicon Affilate Operating Agreement at a legitimate Rubicon URL. But then I realized I broke my rule of never clicking on a URL from an unexpected email. I went back to the email and, being the newly minted professional writer that I am, noticed that it said “weve” when they meant “we’ve” and “youll” when they meant “you’ll”. Seemed kind of phishy for me for a multi-billion dollar corporation to not be 100% buttoned up in their English usage. (As I write this, I am pretty sure I should have put the period inside the parentheses mark and should have used ‘percent’ instead of ‘%’, but Strunk and White don’t rule me!) I freaked out a bit. Should I change every password on every financial site I have on every computer, alive and completely dead, in my house right now? Should I put this one in the microwave? Should I move to Paraguay and change my name? I collected my thoughts and did the right thing when you feel like you might have just exposed yourself to a high tech attack … get very low tech. I looked up Rubicon’s phone number for their Affilate program and called them. I was surprised to get throught to a human pretty quickly. (I’ll call him Julius, as I completely forgot his name already). I asked Julius if Rubicon really sent that email. He read it back to me and said it was from them, so I pulled my laptop out of the microwave and exhaled. Getting turned down to be a Rubicon affiliate is a much better problem to deal with than figuring out what to pack for a new life in Paraguay. I’m on that and I like my chances to get that fixed, since I used to manage affiliate marketing for a big company myself way back in the day when it was kind of cool. My larger point in telling this story is to give an example of why I titled this blog entry the way I did. If you want to be an author, there is a LOT more stuff outside of actually writing the great American novel/leadership book/cookbook that you have to do. You are crossing a bright line between being a private person to a public figure. (What was the name of the river Julius Caeser famously decided to cross?) I have had to think about things in the last few weeks that I never even knew existed (e.g., hacker insurance, speaker bureaus). I haven’t found any of it to be particularly impossible, but it is surprising… and it is work. Tonight’s story was just one small example of many sure to come.
Getting Reviews for an Unwritten Book (November 19, 2014)
A big part of an author’s job is to promote their book to boost sales. One way to do that is to get testimonials, or reviews of the book, by people with impressive names or titles that will make other people intrigued enough to buy it. So that is what I am doing now. I am going through my network of LinkedIn and Facebook connections and getting a list of people who would be good names and titles to have on the book cover, the website, etc.. It is actually a fun excuse to go through my networks to see what people are up to. That said, I hate asking friends for favors, so I need to get a bit better with that. Mike is gathering testimonials as well and he is much better at it than me. In fact, for his first book, he took a shot in the dark and asked Duke’s legendary basketball coach, Mike Krzyzewski for a review. It wasn’t totally a shot in the dark, as Mike was a fellow West Point grad and Duke professor, but I was still impressed that Coach K responded quite quickly with a well-thought out review of his outline. I better get on it.
“Writers write.” (December 19, 2014)
I was listening to a sports talkshow podcast a few months ago and a caller identified himself as an aspiring writer. The show host, ESPN’s Matthew Berry, asked the caller if he had a website where he could check out his work while they chatted on the phone. Berry, who is a prolific writer as well as on-air personality, strikes me as a great example of a professional writer. He cranks out words by the metric ton in his regular columns and he has a book out as well. He is a writer’s writer. So when Berry saw that the caller’s website had very little content and had not been updated in weeks he challenged the guy. Not in a mean way, but more in a constructive way to help motivate the guy. Despite Berry’s typical verbose style, he summed up his advice to this aspiring writer in just two words: “Writers write.” With my deadline to get the finished manuscript to the publisher now just 43 days away, I get how profound that simple piece of advice was. Writing is hard work. Very hard work. I can feel my brain burning calories when I do it. It is easy to find excuses to not start. “Gotta just do this one thing before I sit down and start…” After I start writing, it is very easy to get distracted, with the InterWebsBook a seductive siren that never stops and is just a click away. I note the irony that the computers that make writing so much easier than typewriters of old are a double-edged sword that way. The good news is that I think I have found a good system to keep the word pump that is “my finger bones connected to my brain bones” going. I found the schedule that works best for me. (I have a someone who has helped me figure that out, but I will save the story about my writing muse/coach/good siren later.) Workout first thing in morning and then I can focus on writing the whole day without worrying about that. Get started and make a nice dent before lunch. Go out for lunch out and then set up office and write in the local coffee shop. Set a goal of at least 1000 new words before I can call it a day. Make an entry on a spreadsheet that lists new words per day and how many left to the requirement in the publishing contract. So, as of this morning, we are at just about 20,000 words, with 30,000 to go. If I remember my arithmetic, we are nearing the halfway point. With two of us writing away, that makes 15,000 words each over the next 43 days. I better get going…
The Mechanics of Writing a Book (January 26, 2015)
Have Laptop, Have Office (January 27, 2015)
My First Royalty Check (January 29, 2015)
Manuscript Off to Publisher? Now What (January 30, 2015)
What to Expect When You’re Expecting a Book (February 9, 2015)
Hurry Up and Wait (March 12, 2015)
Forty days and forty nights. That is how long it has been since I sent in the final manuscript to the publisher a day ahead of our deadline. The months leading up to that day were like a series of daily sprints. Each day had a goal to chip away at the 50,000 words we were on the hook to produce for the publisher. If I had a 1000 word day, I felt great. Anything less than that, I felt like I fell short. I don’t think I have had that clear of a daily goal since I cut grass in a summer job. Since then, the pace has been exactly the opposite. We just wait for the publisher to get back to us and we can’t even touch the master copy, as they now own any and all edits. They did a very nice job of explaining that and setting expectations when we submitted the manuscript. Still, it is a weird transition to go from having the book be all consuming to radio silence. I would like to think that our draft was so perfectly designed and worded that the editors are struggling to find a single word to change, and that is what is taking so long. More realistically, I know from the overview of the process that they gave us that this is how it works. Oh well, stay tuned.
Promotion in Motion
(This was my last blog entry. The book released on July 15, 2015. It hit the Top 20 bestseller lists in a few Amazon.com categories, became one of the top 10 bestselling books of all time for its publisher; was translated into Chinese and Korean versions; and is held by 800+ library systems in 15 countries across 5 continents, according to WorldCat.org.)
Victor Prince 