As I awaited word from the editor at Simon & Schuster regarding my mighty tome, I decided to create what is today called an online platform, but at the time was just a web site, when blogs didn’t exist. It wasn’t something I was doing just for fun, although I did enjoy it. Creating a web site was one of things that I had said I would do in my proposal as part of my promotion and marketing plan. [...]
Although I am not a political fan, I do something that Ronald Reagan used to do. When he ran for election, he “ran scared.” It was his way of saying that he wasn’t going to lose because he was overconfident. When I write, I put my finger on the panic button, and I don’t let up until I’m done. That’s not my way of saying anything. It’s also not advice. That’s just the way I write. [...]
The offer from Simon & Schuster was not what I was expecting – because the offer wasn’t for the book that I had written about in my proposal. Jane called me (that would be Jane Dystel, my stellar literary agent, in case you haven’t seen the other posts in this series) and she went over the details before I spoke with the editor, Lisa Considine. [...]
After signing a contract with literary agent Jane Dystel, my first task was to rewrite my non-fiction book proposal for her. I received in the mail an example of what she was looking for and also some specific changes in the proposal that I had originally sent to her. It was a pretty extensive rewrite. [...]
From the outset, my query letter met with some amount of success. I’ll take some credit for having written a solid query, but it was also the right topic at the right time. The popularity of tattoos was soaring, many of the books that had been published about tattoos were older, and the tattoo book glut had yet to begin in earnest. [...]
You may have noticed in my last post about how I wrote my non-fiction book proposal that the class that I took was ten weeks long but it only took nine to write it. That’s because the last week of the class was devoted to writing a query letter. Why write a book proposal if you’re not going to actually try to get a book published? [...]