Archives for March 2008
March 27th, 2008
Read the other parts of this series:
Making a schedule
I had been hired to write, but I suddenly started doing a lot of math. I calculated how many copies I’d have to sell to earn out my advance and I figured out the rate at which I had to write. My book was supposed to be approximately 80,000 words, which is about 150 single-spaced pages in Microsoft Word. I had 9 months to give birth to this baby. That meant that I had to write at least 6666 words a month, or about 222 words a day. That was assuming everything flowed perfectly from my fingertips without need for revisions. I needed to start writing - yesterday.
In January I went on a writing blitzkrieg. I spent three hours every night working on the book. This was after I spent eight hours at my day job, came home, exercised and prepared a well-balanced dinner. (It would have been tragically ironic if the process of writing a weight-loss memoir caused me to gain weight.) I worked at my desktop computer, which sat on a metal desk…directly in front of a window…in the middle of January. I am obviously not a feng shui master. I threw a comforter over my legs, but even typing at 80 words per minute couldn’t keep my fingers completely warm. I thought about rearranging the furniture, but my desks are heavy and even I didn’t want that much of a work out.
I already had a rough draft of the first several chapters done at the end of January when I had my first telephone conversation with my editor. We’d never actually talked until this point. We went over what the process would be like. I suspect the process varies from publisher to publisher and depends a lot on the preferences of the editor and the author. My editor made a schedule of when each chapter needed to be completed to stay on schedule. She requested that I put each chapter in its own Word document, which made a lot more sense than writing everything in one huge document like I had been doing. I would FTP chapters to a server as I finished them and she would edit them as we went along. For those of you scratching your heads, FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol and is simply a way to store files on a remote server. I backed up the chapters to my own remote server too because I am paranoid. I also bought a battery backup for my computer because the spring thunderstorm season was coming up. I didn’t want to lose pages of breathtaking, Pullitzer-Prize winning prose to a freak black-out.
Book Brain
For the next nine months, the book completely took over my brain. It also took over my life. I worked, slept, ate, exercised and wrote. Somehow I managed to update my blog as well, though in retrospect I have no idea how. I wanted to retain and grow my blog audience so I would have a good platform to launch the book. If my blog withered away, I wouldn’t be able to remind anyone to buy my book when it finally came out. This was all very exhausting, but who knows if I’ll ever write another book? I wanted it to be the best that I could make it. My reputation was on the line and I didn’t want to have any regrets.
Thankfully, my daytime job was not as demanding as it had been when I first started it. This was a boon because I didn’t feel drained at the end of the day. In fact, I came home and felt energized to write. The evenings were when my real life began. I spent the day itching to get home. After writing all evening, I’d go to bed, my body exhausted from running and my mind fatigued from writing.
No matter what I was doing, my mind was always attuned to the book. Whenever I had a thought tangentially related to weight-loss, health or fitness, I’d think “That should go in the book!” I’d suddenly turned on a filter in my brain that’s mission was to collect every single memory related to weight-loss. I was constantly jotting notes in notebooks. I set up a wiki so I could quickly enter notes on the computer from any location that had Internet access. On my 30-minute drive home from work I’d go over and over my fat thoughts in my head, writing sentences and paragraphs in my mind that I would later type into my word processor. Even when I was working out, I’d think about the chapter I was working on. I had a bad case of book brain.
After my January blitzkrieg, my rate of writing slowed down. I typically spent about 3-5 days writing a chapter. I had 18 chapters to write, so it took me about 3-4 months to finish a rough draft. I was really anxious to just get a draft done. It made me tense knowing I had so much more to write. For the most part, I wrote the book linearly, starting with chapter one and moving on to chapter two and then three. The only exception was the final chapter, which I worked on before some of the chapters preceding it. When I finally had a rough draft, I sat on the couch with a feeling of complete relief. Even though the book still needed a lot of revision, I’d constructed the skeleton on which to hang everything. Creating the outline in my book proposal was like writing a pattern for a sweater to knit. Even though I knew what I wanted to make, I had to actually sit there and construct it, row by row, sentence by sentence. I still needed to rip out some stitches, but the basic garment was there.
Emotional toll
I got sick of myself. I spent several hours every evening writing about myself. Then I’d write a blog entry all about me. Even when I wasn’t writing, I was thinking about weight and all the ways it had affected my life. Me, me, me, me, me. Some evenings I ditched writing all together just to veg out in front of the TV, turn off my brain, and get completely away from myself.
Writing about my early years was particularly grueling since I had to relive my fat and miserable days. I could only write about those times for an hour or so before getting up from the computer feeling depressed. I hadn’t thought much about my past. I hadn’t analyzed it much on my blog, which was mostly set in the present day. Sometimes my editor would give me feedback asking questions about why certain things were the way they were. I felt like I was in therapy, only I was the one getting paid.
One of the hardest things was that I didn’t know why I had gotten so fat in the first place. Yet I felt like I needed to give some sort of explanation, or at least explain why I didn’t know. Throughout the whole nine months of writing the book I struggled with that issue. It was difficult because you can’t just enter a search query into your brain and request that it return all the results having to do with “fat.” All my memories are stored in my grey matter somewhere, but they are only triggered by events that happen in present day. I had to turn on a filter that caught those memories when they were triggered, like a search agent monitoring the news for a keyword. If someone mentioned eating pizza, I suddenly remembered going to pizza parties as a kid. After a couple months of listening to this filter, I collected a lot of memories and got a better idea of what my early years were like.
My current years were still happening, too. I somehow managed to do some things other than eat, sleep, and write. Frequently I wanted to include these things in the book. I ran a 5K. I took a kickboxing class. I started eating new vegetables. I had to squeeze in these events where I could, since they obviously weren’t in my outline.
Then there was my weight. To their credit, my publisher never once pressured me to lose more weight. However, I really wanted to be able to say I’d lost half my weight on the blurb on the back cover. At the time I signed the contract, I was about 30 pounds away from my goal weight and five pounds away from losing half my weight. I was losing weight steadily and I still had at least a year until the book came out, so I didn’t pressure myself. I just kept doing what I’d been doing. I felt relieved when I officially did lose half my weight at the end of February. My next goal was to be able to say I’d lost 200 pounds, but now that I could say I’d lost half my weight, that other goal was just frosting on the cake I wasn’t eating. Eventually I did bounce down below the 200-pounds-lost mark when I had a cold. I figured a number was a number and it counted even if I’d lost 3 pounds of mucus.
Luckily, the stress of writing a book did not cause me to overeat. Or at least, it didn’t cause me to binge anymore than I occasionally did anyway. If anything, I was so focused on writing and thinking about writing, I had less time to think about food. I was also on such a strict schedule, cramming in work, exercise and writing, that I didn’t have much time to run out to the Dairy Queen.
Residual work ethic
The habits that helped me lose weight, helped me write a book. You don’t want to walk 3 miles tonight? Too bad! Get on the treadmill! You don’t want to write the last half of chapter four? Oh well, sit your ass in front of the computer. I set up a rewards schedule. If I wrote for two hours, I could then watch an hour of TV. If I wrote for another hour, I could have a bowl of pudding. This worked well to motivate me and to break up the work.
Even today, long after I’ve finished writing, I still experience affects of this residual work ethic. Dancing with the Stars used to be one of my favorite shows, but I just couldn’t justify sitting in front of the TV for two hours a night when I could be spending that time working on my book instead. These days I feel weird if I don’t come home and do something productive. If anything, I’m too hard on myself and feel guilty if I do just sit and watch a movie instead of make plans for world domination.
Writing a book was a lot of work and sucked up most of my free time. It was also a crash course in how to write a long-form work, which was very different from writing a blog. I’ll share what I learned next week, as soon as I finish drawing up plans for the Death Star.
Continued in Blog to Book – Part 5: A book is not a blog
Summary
- I made a schedule plotting out when each chapter needed to be done
- I got a case of “book brain” and constantly scribbled notes in journals or on the computer
- Writing a memoir took an emotional toll because I had to examine parts of my life I’d avoided
- Writing a book, working full time, and exercising regularly sucked up most of my time
- The same work ethic that helped me lose weight, helped me stay on task writing a book.
March 27th, 2008
My book was mentioned in a recent AP article, which poses the question Weight-Loss Tales Inspire, at What Cost?
The answer? $15.95 or only $10.85 if you pre-order today
.
ETA: This is kind of funny. The story was also picked up by The Seattle Times which titled it Weight-loss shows, memoirs offer hope to dieters. Funny how the title changes what you expect of the article.
March 15th, 2008
Read the other parts of this series:
Telling the world
I called my mom.
I hadn’t told anyone I was pursuing a book deal, but now that an offer was on the table, I decided it was time to blab. The first person I wanted to tell was my mom. She didn’t pick up the phone. I was in danger of exploding all over the telephone if I didn’t tell someone my good news immediately, so I left a message and then called my younger brother who lived in town. He didn’t answer his phone either. So I called my older brother long distance and thankfully he answered his phone, saving my organs from splattering all over my flatscreen monitor.
Telling people about the book was really fun.The best part about having good news is being able to share it with other people. My only regret is that I told everyone over the phone and did not get to see the stunned expressions on their faces. For some reason I was surprised by how happy everyone else was for me. Obviously I was happy, but my family and friends were just as thrilled as me, as if my happiness were a disease and I were infecting the world with joy. The glow of bliss emanating from this event was so bright that it encompassed everyone in its halo. I was especially surprised that this special thing was happening to me. Special things happened to other people.
In need of advice
Next, I called two of my aunts. One is a professional proofreader who knows people in publishing. The other is a lawyer. I needed advice on negotiating a book contract because I had absolutely no idea how to negotiate a book contract. Although I had an offer, it was still just an offer and not a legally binding agreement until the papers were signed. Now that I had told people, it would be completely mortifying if the contract fell through. I wanted to take care of this as quickly as possible before my publisher had time to redact the offer or find some other former fat girl to write a book.
Too bad everyone was off for the holidays. My contract offer was the best Christmas gift I’d ever gotten, but the timing meant that everyone in the publishing and legal industries was out of their offices for a week or two. Ultimately, this was a good thing because it gave me time to learn everything I possibly could about book contracts. I did online research and read author forums, but I found the book Negotiating a Book Contract: A Guide for Authors, Agents and Lawyers
by Mark Levine to be the most helpful. (It appears to be out of print which I find unsurprising since the copy I checked out from the library was falling apart.) It explained every part of the contract, translated the legal gobblygook, and told me what clauses to pay particular attention to. And trust me, there was a lot of gobblygook. I had to learn about indemnification and high discount sales and second serial rights. It was like learning pig latin. It sort of sounded like English, but it wasn’t.
I also read The Writer’s Legal Companion
by Brad Bunnin and Peter Beren which has a chapter on contracts as well as other helpful legal information for authors. After doing an Amazon search, I’m wondering why I didn’t also check out Kirsch’s Guide to the Book Contract: For Authors, Publishers, Editors and Agents
by Jonathan Kirsch which looks informative. Perhaps it was already checked out from the library?
Negotiating the contract
My aunts gave me names of intellectual property lawyers I could contact. Once these lawyers returned from Christmas vacations in Tahiti, I contacted one of them. In retrospect, it would have been better if I’d started looking for a lawyer before I got an offer because finding one, setting up an agreement with one, and working your way into their schedule takes time. Then I negotiated back and forth with the publisher until we had a contract we could both agree on. I did the actual negotiating myself and took a lot of pride in doing it. I was glad I’d done my research and taken the time to understand what every sentence in the contract meant. I don’t have an agent, and I probably could have gotten a better deal if I did since agents have a lot of experience and insider knowledge that gives them power. But one of the advantages of working with a smaller press is that they don’t always require you be agented to look at your work. Ultimately I got a deal I was happy with, a deal I considered to be good. If I ever write another book, I would certainly consider getting an agent to consult on the contract. They usually earn their 10%. I think having an agent is also like buying “stupid insurance.” If anything goes wrong, you can at least say you had professional advice and didn’t screw it up on your own.
I’m obviously not going to discuss the details of my contract because people are weird about money and you can never win anyway. Either you’ll think I’m an ass who got paid too much or you’ll think I’m an idiot who got ripped off. You can find detailed information on what book contracts contain in the books I listed above. Essentially, contracts are for when things go wrong, not for when things go right. A lot of the contract was devoted to how things would be handled if things went wrong, like if I was late meeting a deadline or the publisher went out of business. Other parts were dedicated to things that will probably never happen, like who gets paid for TV and movie rights. The rest stated when I had to turn in my final manuscript, how long it should be, how royalties would be determined and what my advance would be.
The publisher paid me half of my advance upon signing and half upon completion of the work. The advance is an advance against royalties. I make a certain percentage of money off of every book sold. Until I earn enough royalties to total that advance, I don’t get paid anything. Once I’ve earned enough royalties to equal that advance, I’ll start getting paid for everything I’ve earned over it. It’s great to get as big of an advance as you can because that’s money you get to keep even if your book never sells a copy. However, if your book never sells a copy, it’s going to be harder to get a deal like that again because you will be considered a huge failure by your publisher. My advance wasn’t huge. I couldn’t quit my job. But I liked the fact that I wouldn’t have to sell a zillion copies for my book to be considered a success.
Shopping around
It occurred to me during this process that I could shop my book around to other publishers. I could have tried to get more money from a bigger publishing house who could give me a bigger run and a bigger publicity budget. I could have tried to get a hardback deal instead of the paperback deal I was offered. Then I’d get an opportunity to earn money off of both the original hardback release and a possible paperback release a year later. I could have looked for an agent to see what other offers s/he might be able to dig up for me.
I decided not to do these things for a couple reasons. First, I knew Seal Press was genuinely interested in my book because they were the ones who approached me about it and helped me develop the idea. Second, Seal Press is a feminist press that publishes books for women by women. I liked that they had a mission. They are a company with employees to pay, so they have to make money first to survive, but I liked that they weren’t just about making money. Third, I figured that I would have more influence with a smaller press and I would not get lost among a sea of other authors. Fourth, I’d developed a good rapport with my editor and was looking forward to working with her. It would have been rather stab-me-in-the-back to have taken her time and advice in creating the proposal and then go sell it to someone else. I still could have done it, but I would have felt like shit about it and burnt my only bridge in the publishing industry. Finally, this was a sure thing happening right now. I didn’t want to gamble it away for the hope of a better deal somewhere else. I didn’t want to have to tell a story about that time I blew my big book deal.
Welcome to Seal Press
It took about a month to negotiate the contract. This time was mostly spent reading books, researching the hell out of book contracts, and waiting for people to come back from vacations. We came to a final agreement near the end of January. I was sent two hard copies of the contract in the mail signed by the publisher. I kept one for myself, signed the other and mailed it back. I even splurged for delivery confirmation.
Now I just had to write the book.
Continued in Blog to Book - Part 4: Logistics, writing schedule and book brain
Summary
- It certainly helps to have an agent to get a book deal, but you can get a nice deal without one.
- Even if you have a lawyer or an agent, read about contracts and make sure you understand what every sentence means. If you’re signing it, it’s your responsibility to know what you’re getting into.
- I recommend the following books for detailed information on book contracts: Negotiating a Book Contract: A Guide for Authors, Agents and Lawyers by Mark Levine and The Writer’s Legal Companion by Brad Bunnin and Peter Beren
March 14th, 2008
I’ve added my confirmed schedule of events to the site. I’d be happy to see you at any of these places. Buy a book, ask a question, and take a picture in my fat pants! I hope you can make it.
At this time, I’ve only scheduled events near my home town of Indianapolis. I might hit some other places in the future, and if I do I’ll post it on this site.
March 2nd, 2008
Read the other parts of this series:
Watching the in-box
At the beginning of October I sent my editor some writing samples. Weeks went by. My inbox was full of emails, but I could only see the reply that wasn’t there. After a while I figured I’d been blown off. I was too scared to follow up because I didn’t want to be rejected out right. I was too scared to hope that a book deal might actually happen. It was safer just to let it go. This way I hadn’t actually failed to get a contract because I’d never actually submitted a proposal. I’d just chatted a bit with an editor and now I had a funny story about the time I talked to a book publisher – a story I would never tell ANYONE. Besides, I hadn’t even lost half my weight yet. Surely it would be better to wait until I was at my goal weight to start writing a book. I went back to my life and decided to forget about the whole thing.
In late November she wrote me back.
She hadn’t blown me off. She just hadn’t read the email. It got sorted incorrectly in her email program. Let this be a lesson to you all. FOLLOW UP! If my editor hadn’t been so diligent, I might still have that funny story that I would have never told ANYONE. I sent her my samples again. This time I got a reply. She loved them. She said I was talented. She wanted to pursue the idea. I felt like someone had injected sunshine into my veins with a syringe. This book thing might just happen after all.
Writing a proposal
Now I had to write a book proposal. As I understand it, if you are writing a work of fiction, it’s common to write the whole book before submitting it to publishing houses. However, when you are writing non-fiction, you just submit a proposal. A book proposal is to a book like a business plan is to a company. In it you:
- Summarize what your book is about
- Write a chapter by chapter summary of the book
- List competing books and describe how yours will be different or similar
- Pitch the reasons your book will sell and make your publisher lots of money
- Include writing samples
- Include an author bio
Jenna Glatzer wrote a great series of posts about how to write a book proposal on the Absolute Write forums that is more thorough than anything I can share. I found it very helpful when writing my proposal and I’d highly recommend that anyone writing a proposal check it out. My editor also sent me a copy of a proposal for a book they had published. She included guiding notes in certain sections about what I should include, sometimes pasting information I’d emailed her. I referred to this often as I wrote my own book proposal.
Writing a proposal requires you to do all the deep thinking about your book before you write it. I play the part of a web developer in my day job, so this reminded me of how you scope out every detail of a program before you write a single line of code. Because I’d been blogging regularly for almost two years, I’d done most of my deep thinking already, I just had to organize it in a cohesive matter.
Sorting through two years of my life
So I did something I hadn’t done since I started blogging: I read my entire blog from start to finish. This took several evenings, even though I was skimming. I kept flipping back and forth between a Word document and my web browser, jotting down bullet points of essential ideas or funny stories that I wanted to include in my book. It ended up being 10 pages long, single spaced. I did not suffer from lack of material.
I then started sorting all my bullet points into different topics. Some themes were obvious, like food, exercise, clothing. Some themes were harder to sort out, but I eventually organized everything into chapters. I then wrote a short summary for each chapter, including all the elements in my bullet points but giving the book as a whole a narrative arc. Luckily my story had a natural arc – fat to thin, but it was still a major pain in the ass organizing everything.
Checking out the competition (on my library card)
Next, I had to figure out how my book would be different than other weight-loss memoirs. This was hard to do since I hadn’t actually read any other weight-loss memoirs. Oops! I wanted to get this proposal done as fast as possible before the opportunity slipped away, so I didn’t have time to read half a dozen books. My editor had already listed competing works in the notes on the example proposal, so I checked out what was available from the library and skimmed them. I read the summaries on the back and the reviews on Amazon.com and fudged this part of the proposal as best as I could.
Selling it
I took care to write my proposal in the same wry and humorous tone of my blog, the same tone I would write the book in. It wouldn’t make much sense to pitch a funny book in a dull tone of voice. I expressed as much confidence as I could and I tried to write punchy text that broke down the main selling points of my book in a concise, yet fun manner. I used my traffic stats to pitch my blog as my main selling platform. I also included several readers’ comments that addressed all the different reasons people liked my blog and would buy my book: humor, inspiration, and honesty. I picked writing samples that exhibited those qualities and varied in tone and style. I presented myself as best as I could in my bio even though I didn’t have any big, impressive accomplishments and I’ve never been on Oprah. I mentioning the time I guestblogged at another popular site, the time I won best of prose in the college literary magazine and I even threw in a quote from a reader who worked at a newspaper in Texas. I pimped myself up, shook my moneymaker and sold myself as best as I could. I even threw in a before-and-after photo.
All in all it took one and a half weeks to write. At the time, this seemed like an eternity. After losing almost two months to a lost email, I wanted to precede as quickly as possible. However, I now know that writing a book proposal in a week and a half is insanely fast. Most people would have to be hopped up on amphetamines and give up sleep to write a book proposal that fast. Usually proposals take months to write. But in reality, I’d already been working on my proposal for two years. Every time I wrote a blog entry I was thinking through issues that I included in my book. All I had to do for the proposal was organize my ideas, write a bio, and think of the reasons why people would want to buy my book. Then I sold those qualities as best as I could. Ultimately your book proposal is your sales pitch to the publisher. If you don’t know why anyone would want to buy your book, why should they want to publish it?
Sending it to the publisher
After careful spell-checking, I sent the proposal to my editor asking for her input. I was expecting her to send me constructive criticism, but instead she said it was awesome and exactly what she wanted. First, she would take the proposal to an editorial meeting. If it got past that round it would then go to another level. I sent the proposal in on Monday, the meeting was on Thursday.
It was a long week.
By Friday I hadn’t heard anything from my editor. Writing a proposal had been fascinating and educational, but I’d figured this wasn’t really going to happen. It had been a better ride than any roller coaster thinking that I might, possibly, maybe get a book published. I distinctly recall sitting on my couch in the living room, feeling happy that I’d pursued the idea and given 100%, but also being somewhat relieved that reality seemed to be kicking in. I’d still have that funny story, but I might just tell it to someone now if they got me really drunk.
I still hadn’t heard anything from her over the weekend, however I’d learned from my earlier email shenanigans that I MUST FOLLOW UP. I emailed her on Monday asking how it went, ready to let the whole thing go and thank her for all the time and effort she’d put into helping me with my proposal. She replied and told me that they dug it. It was on to the bigger editorial meeting and then we’d know for sure.
I started looking into lawyers. I started emailing published authors that I didn’t know for advice about book contracts. I started to think this might, possibly, maybe happen. On December 19th, 2006, I checked my email. A boilerplate book contract was attached as a PDF. My editor welcomed me to the Seal Press family.
I got up from my computer chair and walked around my apartment in a euphoric daze. I laid down in my walk-in closet, staring at the faint water stains on the ceiling in the dark and felt the purest buzz of “happy” that I’ve ever experienced. This was actually going to happen. I was going to be a published author. I was going to write a book.
Holy crap. I had to write a book.
Continued in Blog to Book - Part 3: Negotiating a contract
Summary
- Don’t be afraid to follow-up with a publisher, but try not to nag either.
- Research the elements of a book proposal and read example proposals.
- Your blog can be a good source of material because it’s where you’ve already done a lot of thinking.
- Figure out what the main selling points of your book are and what your selling platform is. Then pitch them as best as you can.
- Use the same tone and style in your proposal as you intend to use in your book.
- If your blog readers have said nice things about you, include those in your pitch.
- Accept that, hey, just maybe, this might possibly happen.
