His arrival in Philadelphia is one of the most famous scenes in autobiographical literature: the bedraggled 17-year-old runaway, cheeky yet with a pretense of humility, straggling off the boat and buying three puffy rolls as he wanders up Market Street.
Walter Isaacson
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

John Wilkes Booth awoke Good Friday morning, April 14, 1865, hungover and depressed.
James L. Swanson
Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer

Vatican propaganda notwithstanding, Peter was never “bishop of Rome.”
Thomas Cahill
Pope John XXIII: A Life

“I promise you four papers,” the young patent examiner wrote his friend.
Walter Isaacson
Einstein: His Life and Universe

Popular myth has it that one of the most remarkable conversations in modern literary history took place on a cool and misty late autumn afternoon in 1896, in the small village of Crowthorne in the county of Berkshire.
Simon Winchester
The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary

In the early nineties (it might have been 1992 but it’s hard to remember when you’re having a good time) I joined a rock-and-roll band composed mostly of writers.
Stephen King
On Writing

If the intended reader of this book should want to go beyond disagreement with its author and try to identify the sins and deformities that animated him to write it (and I have certainly noticed that those who publicly affirm charity and compassion and forgiveness are often inclined to take this course), then he or she will not just be quarreling with the unknowable and ineffable creator who–presumably–opted to make this way.
Christopher Hitchens
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

I am not all here, it’s true.
Terry Brooks
Sometimes the Magic Works: Lessons from a Writing Life

The title of this book differs by only two letters from that of a book first published in 1988.
Stephen Hawking with Leonard Mlodinow
A Briefer History of Time

In November 2008 the surviving members of the original Monty Python team, stunned by the extent of digital piracy of their videos, issued a very stern announcement on YouTube.
Chris Anderson
Free: The Future of a Radical Price

Flying into Australia, I realized with a sigh that I had forgotten again who their prime minister is.
Bill Bryson
In a Sunburned Country

What should we have for dinner?
Michael Pollan
The Omnivore’s Dilemna: A Natural History of Four Meals

Anybody else have non-fiction line they’d like to throw out?
Do any of these lines make you want to read the book? Or just the first paragraph?

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!

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.

To that end, I acquired my domain name, selected an ISP to host it, and created a small site called TattooSymbol.com that crowed about the upcoming publication, although I had no release date.  There was some information about the book, some information about me, and some information about Greg (who did the illustrations for the book, in case you’ve missed the previous posts).  I gave a couple of examples of tattoo definitions and then left it at that until the book got close to release.  Initially, I coded all of the HTML by hand, switched to an entirely PHP driven site when it started to get unwieldy, then switched to GoLive and all of its tools for updating a large site, and now I use Dreamweaver.  I also select and prepare all of the images myself.

That web site has gone through a few major morphs, but it somehow attracted attention from the start.  I did nothing in terms of publicizing it, nor have I ever, but it’s about tattoos, and that’s just a really popular topic, especially on the web. Today, it gets about 7,000 unique visitors every day, over half-a-million page views per month, and I still add fresh content there on a regular basis.  In fact, 15% of the visitors there are returnees.

Today, I call the fledgling TerisaGreen.com site my online platform.  Using WordPress, the Atahualpa theme, and several plug-ins, I was able to easily incorporate all kinds of cool features, including a blog and comments.  At its heart, the TattooSymbol.com web site is for people who are considering getting a tattoo.  My intent for the TerisaGreen.com web site, however, is to make a dialogue possible, about all sorts of topics – including how to get a book published.  So, let’s get back to that topic.

In month twenty-seven of my effort to get a book published, after creating a web site and traveling steadily if laboriously down the road to a real live book, there finally came a bump.  I received dire news from my editor at Simon & Schuster.

Next post:  Step 10.  Working With The Publisher

In my timeline of how to get a non-fiction book published, wherein I started writing the proposal in month one, I started writing the book in month thirteen.  Thank god I hadn’t started writing the book that I had proposed, since that’s not the book that the publisher wanted.

I had the following mandate for The Tattoo Encyclopedia:  1,000 entries, 70,000 words, 300 images, done in twelve months.  I was working full-time plus teaching a class at UCLA.  Tattoo artist Greg James had a waiting list of clients that was and is, literally, months long.  To say that we were stressed that year is just silly.  My panic button finger was starting to get gangrene.  I’m pretty sure that Greg stopped sleeping.

One constant source of support, though, aside from my husband, who is glorious, was my literary agent, Jane Dystel.  She called me every month.  We talked about my progress and how things were going, and she’d offer encouragement.  She was checking on me – I knew that.  But I always looked forward to these calls, partly because my finger was on the button and I really was making progress, and partly because she understood what Greg and I were trying to do.

However, I began to realize, as I filled my database with research and writing on 1,000 different tattoos, that each entry was going to have to be brief.  Really brief.  The book was also supposed to include an introduction (I was going to work prehistory and history into it somehow) and also summary sections at the end that grouped similar types of tattoos together (animal tattoos, Celtic tattoos, Japanese tattoos, etc.).  When the editor and I had talked about the book being a real reference, we had somewhat arbitrarily landed on the number of 1,000 entries.  I eventually came to realize that I had conflicting criteria.  I needed each entry to define the meaning (usually multiple meanings) for a tattoo, adequately enough for a reference.  In two thirds of these entries I also needed to describe the tattoo itself, since there would be no image.  But, in each entry, I’d only have an average of 60 words.  The paragraph you’re reading is already 165 words.

So, I decided to err on the side of writing entries that were too long, but that covered the essentials of a tattoo’s meaning for someone who was considering it as their tattoo.  When you’re making your tattoo choice, it’s impossible to have too much information.  It’s a tattoo for crying out loud.

Finally, though, twelve months after we began, Greg and I finished on time but my word count had ballooned to 100,000 words.  I was thinking that the publisher was getting some kind of deal, paying for 70,000 words but getting more.  I thought that would be a boon.  Boy was I wrong.

Next post:  Step 9.  Creating My Online Platform

It turns out that my proposal for a book about how tattoos can communicate all kinds of messages (it was tentatively titled, Unveiling Tattoo) had crossed Lisa’s desk just after a proposal for a dream dictionary.  She then came up with the idea of putting the two together for a tattoo dictionary, starting with A and finishing with Z.  Although S&S wanted a book about tattoos, they wanted it to be a reference book.  And, as a reference book, it had to be fairly substantive, i.e., have numerous entries.

I knew that Jane had already beaten long odds to get the proposal as far as it had gotten.  It was a far cry from what I had proposed, but I jumped at the chance to write it anyway.  I said I’d be glad to write a tattoo dictionary.

The next step was talking to Lisa and making sure that we both understood what the tattoo dictionary was going to be about.  I was on board, right down the line, right up until she said that, like a dream dictionary, it didn’t need any images.

No images?  In a book about tattoos?  Hmmm.

I then talked with Jane (this is all happened on the same day, by the way) and I begged for images.  We talked about the number of dictionary entries that Lisa had in mind, as well as a word count, a due date, and the amount of the advance that they were offering.  It all seemed good except that I really felt that a book about tattoos that didn’t have any images was going to be about as appealing as dry pasta.  We hashed out how many images I thought I might need and I reasoned that it’d be ideal to have an image for every entry but acceptable to have one for every third entry.  I then made frantic phone calls to tattoo artist Greg James and he graciously agreed to do the drawings.

Jane got S&S to agree to one image for every third tattoo definition, but they insisted that all of the images had to be line art, without color and without grey shading, black lines only.  It was a severe limitation to Greg’s artistry, but once again, he accepted graciously.

In the end, Jane not only got the book hammered out to everybody’s satisfaction, she got the advance more than doubled.  Yes, that’s right, more than doubled.  I was already flying high, but this was so totally and completely a surprise that I couldn’t help but howl “You rock!” into the phone.  Despite the fact that I must have burst an ear drum, she managed to laugh.

I signed the contract not long after and, in my timeline of how to get published, where I started writing my proposal in month one, this was month thirteen, and the real work was about to begin.

Next post: Step 8.  Writing The Tattoo Encyclopedia

So, in a couple of iterations, I rewrote the proposal for about two months, almost as long as it had taken to write the original.  Did I mention the rewrite was extensive?  While I was working on it, I referred to the following books, most of which I had bought when taking the proposal writing class:

Shortest Distance Between You and a Published Book by Susan Page

How to Get Happily Published by Judith Appelbaum

How to Write a Book Proposal by Michael Larsen

Writer’s Digest Handbook of Magazine Article Writing by Jean M. Fredette

Getting Your Book Published: Inside Secrets of a Successful Author by Robert W. Bly

The Art of Creative Nonfiction: Writing and Selling the Literature of Reality (Wiley Books for Writers Series) by Lee Gutkind

In my timeline, where I had started to write the proposal in month one, the rewriting process occurred in months eight and nine.  Then, in month ten, the proposal received its final blessing and I sent to Jane.  You can see it here (PDF, 4.36MB).  It is many, many times better than my first proposal.

Next post: Step 7.  The Book Offer from Simon & Schuster

To recap my timeline:  At the end of month three, I had my finished proposal and query letter.  At the beginning of month four, I sent out twelve query letters.  Now, in month five, I received one request for the proposal.  I sent it immediately and, in keeping with my plan to send to agents exclusively, I waited to hear back, and it was a pass.

So, in month six, I sent out twelve more query letters.  I received another request for the proposal in month six, which was also a pass.  In month seven, I had a third request for the proposal – and then something wonderful happened.

On a weekend, I don’t remember if it was a Saturday or Sunday, we got home and there was a voice mail from Jane Dystel, saying that she’d like to represent my book.  After shouting to my husband, followed by jumping up and down, followed by some whooping, and then more jumping up and down, I replayed the voice mail.  And yes, it was just an excuse for more jumping and whooping.  Jane had left a phone number where I could get in touch with her and that’s what I did, as soon as I could breathe normally.

Out of all the days in my writing life, this is the day that I remember the best.  Oh frabjous day! Calloo! Callay!

Next post: Step 6.  Rewriting The Proposal

Before I wrote the query letter, I had to decide if I wanted to contact publishers directly or try to get a literary agent.  That was pretty much a no-brainer for me.  I had met authors, in person and online, who had not used a literary agent, and they had varying stories of success and not-much-success.  But I think that after having been exposed to and part of several types of industries before I decided to write a book, I had already decided that I didn’t want to learn another type of industry, even if it were possible.  The world of book publishing was, and still is, inscrutable to me.

Also, in general, I am very much in favor of paying an expert professional for their knowledge, contacts, and experience.  I have found that from plumbing to taxes, and everything in between, I save money in the end.  Sometimes the money amounts to the time I save that I can then spend working on something that I know how to do.  Sometimes it’s the real bucks that flow back to me that I would never have known about or to which I would never have had access.  Almost every time, though, I avoid the headache and stress that come from trying to make decisions that will have a very real impact down the line.

So, trying to find a literary agent was something I most definitely wanted to do.  To that end, I wrote and rewrote my query letter, in the tenth week of my online course on how to write a non-fiction book proposal, and you can read it below in a PDF.

Query Letter

Next post: Step 4.  Querying Agents

The class was one quarter long at UCLA Extension (where there are three quarters per year), i.e., the class was ten weeks longs.  Although the specific class that I took was called Writing Non-Fiction That Sells, they have since changed the names of their classes and now also offer more weekend workshops.  Plus, the course offerings vary from quarter to quarter, so it’s impossible for me to post a link to a specific class.  Here is the UCLA Extension web site though.

The good news about many of the classes offered in the Writer’s Program is that you can take them online.  The bad news is that they can cost upwards of $500.  Because I was also teaching archaeology for Extension, I was able to take one class gratis for each one that I taught.  That made the online class pretty affordable.

So, in the first nine weeks of the class, while I was working full-time (and then some), I developed a book proposal for a non-fiction book about tattoos.  Although I had begun with an idea that was more the archaeology and history of tattoos, I quickly changed my mind after the overwhelming feedback that I received from the instructor and other students was a collective digital yawn.  I moved instead to a topic that was more about how tattoos communicate messages, and proceeded to run with that.

Each week of the class, we worked on a specific part of the proposal (overview, style, a detailed outline of each chapter, the audience, competitive books, about the author, marketing and promotion plan).  At the end of nine weeks, I had this proposal (PDF, 120KB).

There are, however, a couple of caveats about this proposal.  First, this is not the proposal that was sent to publishers.  That version comes later.  This is the version that I sent to literary agents, when requested.  Second, virtually all of the data is now completely out of date.  And even though parts of it make me cringe in hindsight, I offer it as a real world example of what an online course on writing non-fiction book proposals can produce, even if you work full-time.

As always, I like to emphasize the bite-size nature of each step in the process of getting a book published.  Even writing the proposal was done one section at a time, but also on a deadline.  To look at the entire list of steps to be accomplished can be daunting.  My own experience was much more plodding and short sighted, just concentrating on the step ahead of me.  In hindsight, that really worked in my favor.

Next post:  Step 3.  Writing A Query Letter

The idea of writing a book about tattoos was not mine.  I knew I wanted to write a book, because I had just finished writing a dissertation (and had enjoyed the hell out of it).  So, when casting about for an idea, I had naturally drifted to topics that suited my training in archaeology.

But I was also being tattooed in this same time period – a process that took about one year on the calendar.  Over the course of many tattoo sessions and about 50 hours of actual tattoo time, I had ample opportunity to chat with Greg James, the tattoo artist who was doing my tattoo.  When I mentioned that I was interested in writing a non-fiction book, he suggested that I write one about tattoos.  I had already done the research.

It was a brilliant idea.  As someone steeped in his industry and art, he had given a lot of consideration to many of the topics that I had researched in order to make a good decision about my tattoo.  He was (and is) also at the top of his industry and had been featured in books, magazines, and documentaries.  He knew what he was talking about and a book idea was born.

It was then up to me to review the current books available on tattoo, which I had already done getting ready for my tattoo, but this time with an eye toward what an archaeologist might be able to convince somebody to publish.  I immediately gravitated toward the history, archaeology, and anthropology of tattoos and started coming up with outlines for various tattoo books.  Ultimately, I settled on a mixture of these approaches, as you’ll see in the proposal.

So, you see why I never tell people that they have to think of a great non-fiction book idea.  You’ll also see, in later posts about writing the proposal and also the offer from the publisher, that my idea changed over time and then didn’t end up being the book that I wrote after all.  Even so, this was Step 1. I had an idea and I was excited about it.  In a process that can be long and fraught with pitfalls, I think excitement is important.

Next post: Step 2.  Writing A Non-fiction Book Proposal

And, to steal my own thunder, there is nothing special about me as an author or my first book.  In short, I did what everybody else does (unless you’ve already got a TV show):

1.  I got an outstanding idea for a book.  Note that I didn’t say I came up with the idea.

2. I wrote a book proposal, which included an extensive outline and many other things.  I will be posting it online so that you can see it.  It took exactly nine weeks to write – I’ll explain how I know that.

3. I wrote and rewrote a query letter.  I’ll post this too.

4. I found prospective literary agents who met my criteria and sent my query letter to them.

5. I received a few requests for the proposal and then rejoiced and jumped up and down when a literary agent offered to represent the book.

6. I rewrote the book proposal to my agent’s specifications.  I’ll post the final version.

7. My agent got an offer from book publisher Simon & Schuster and I signed the contract.

8.  I wrote the manuscript, Greg James did the illustrations, and I sent it to Simon & Schuster.  This part of the process took twelve months.

9. I created the TattooSymbol.com web site.

10. The manuscript was edited at Simon & Schuster, rewritten, edited again, and then published.

Easy huh?  Well, it’s not easy but it’s not complicated either.  Each of the posts to follow goes into the details of just how each step was accomplished.

Next post: Step 1.  A Fantabulous Idea for a Non-fiction Book