Month 1 – I started writing a proposal.

Month 3 – The proposal and query letter were finished.

Month 4 – I sent out twelve query letters.

Month 5 – I sent out one proposal.

Month 6 – I sent out twelve more query letters and one proposal.

Month 7 – I sent out one proposal and signed with my literary agent.

Months 8, 9, & 10 – I rewrote my proposal and sent it to my agent.

Month 12 – My agent received an offer from a publisher and I signed a contract with them in month 13.

Month 25 – I submitted the completed manuscript to the publisher.

Month 26 – I created a web site.

So, here, at the twenty-seventh month, I received a call from my editor saying that she was no longer my editor.  Simon & Schuster was downsizing and she was a casualty.  What a crappy phone call for her to have to make, but she tried to be upbeat and she was incredibly kind.  In the end, she said a new editor would be in touch.

But I had to wonder about that.  The Tattoo Encyclopedia had been her idea.  There was no guarantee that anybody else would find it interesting.  Plus, in the downsizing, the remaining editors already had their own projects keeping them busy.  Unfortunately, there was really nothing for me to do but wait.

Thankfully, the waiting was relatively short.  The new editor, Amanda Patten, did indeed contact me and we started work about a month later.  During the following months, a few things about the book changed.

The first thing to change was the title.  The title became The Tattoo Encyclopedia:  A Guide to Choosing Your Tattoo. I was opposed to the title change for a few reasons.  (1) I had never intended to write a guide, per se.  In my mind, a guide was narrative and not an A to Z reference.  (2) I had written brief entries that were in keeping with a dictionary, having kept in the mind the original idea for the book.  They didn’t seem as comprehensive and lengthy as might be expected in an encyclopedia.  Plus, I’d always been told that ‘encyclopedia’ was just the working title.  And (3) I couldn’t spell encyclopedia.  But, the publisher wanted the title and I discovered that I had very little say in the matter.  Although we disagreed, Amanda was entirely polite about the whole thing.  I felt that she had really tried to see my point of view and I knew that we were both just trying to do our jobs.  Even so, my whining meter was pegged.

The cover for the book went from a woodcut clipart file of a book with a scroll in front of it to several examples of Greg’s art superimposed on skin tones.  The font used on it went from a couple of standard serif fonts on a solid background to a badass font on bands of red, orange, and black.  The attention to detail in the final cover was awesome, down to the small pair of cherries on the spine.  On this issue, my whining meter did a step-function and dropped to zero overnight after several weeks of being pegged.  Greg and I had resigned ourselves, after several e-mails and conversations, to the first cover.  Then one day, the final cover, the one on the book today, arrived in the mail.  It came as a complete but welcome surprise since I had no idea that it was even being worked on.

Indeed, preparations and plans beyond my ken had taken place, and they had been based on a projected word count of 70,000 words: the physical size of the book, the cost of the paper, even how many books would fit in a shipping box came from the word count.  You may recall from Step 8 in this series of posts, that I had vastly exceeded this number.  It was now time to pay the piper.  In essence, Amanda and I had to find a way to reduce my text by about a quarter.  Should we take out some of the entries or reduce the size of each one?  In the end, we had to do both.

Along with grammar and spelling corrections, we repetitively reduced the length of the manuscript, mailing it back and forth, back and forth, marking with red and blue pencils, while her assistant did a great job of fact-checking.  Amanda poured over it, examining every sentence with the kind of detail, thought, and patience that made it seem like it had been her book idea instead of one that she’d inherited.

Here, my timeline for the book breaks down.  We spent some number of months working on The Tattoo Encyclopedia and I don’t have a record of when we finished, since we didn’t do it electronically.  However, having started the editing in approximately Month 30 of my timeline, we finished a few months later, call it Month 34 in the timeline.

I can say for sure, however, that I received my first copy of the actual finished book in Month 44 of the timeline.  Fourty-four months, nearly four years, after I had started to write the proposal for a book about tattoos, I received a physical copy of The Tattoo Encyclopedia in the mail.  I do not have a clue as to how this compares to the average in the industry, if there even is such a thing.

Looking back on the process makes it seem like much more work than it felt like at the time.  It helped to be working with wonderful people.  It also helped that I really enjoyed my topic and the process of research and writing.  Despite the fact that I made mistakes and needed to accept compromises, I am still glad to have had the opportunity to have done the book.  There must be a million different paths to this same end and, now that I’ve posted my example, I look forward to hearing about the paths that other writers are taking.  Best of luck to you on your path!