Update on the book

I really hope this is the first update in a series of ones to come.  For those of you who don't know how this works (I counted myself among you up until recently), let me take a minute to explain. 

You write a bunch of words, send it to a publishing house, they give you lots of money, and publish your book.  Then they send you on all expense paid trips to exotic locations to market the book.  A movie producer comes along, throws even more money at you, and makes your book into a movie.


I'll definitely need a room to store all my gold bullion

Do it again for a second book and continue to do so until nobody wants to hear what you have to say any longer.

Pretty simple, right?

So maybe that isn't actually how it works.

Here's the process as I've gone through it.

I started writing stuff down so my girls could have a little insight into what life was like when they were young.  Julia does a great job journaling, but since my handwriting is nearly illegible, I decided to type. 

When I reached 30,000 words (easily more than I had ever written at one time in my life) I decided to have some other people look at it and see what they thought.  While I merely asked for feedback, one person went ahead and forwarded a copy of it to his agent.

The agent then called and asked the one question he could think of:

Is this it?

I really didn't know how to take that.  His question could mean "I love this so much I hope there's more" or "This is awful, please tell me this is just a joke".  Turns out it was closer to the first. 

He told me I really needed to be at 75,000 words to be something a publisher could work with, so I continued writing.  The first 30,000 words took four or five months, but the next 45,000 only took a few weeks.  Honestly, the girls were so interesting, funny, and educational I didn't have a hard time finding something to write about.

75,000 words is not that many, but it felt like it to me

The agent then told me to start blogging, as I stated here in case you haven't been with me from the start.  I think that basically narrows the list down to anyone other than my wife and parents.

The other thing he told me to do was to create a book proposal.  With his help we did just that.  A book proposal is merely a condensed version of who you are, why you wrote a book, what gives you the right to write it, and how the publisher can benefit from it.

That book proposal went out to several different editors last week to see if anyone is willing to take a shot on an unknown, first time author.

That's all I know for now.  I'll keep you updated as time goes on.  With any luck, my next update post will be about the book being picked up and not something along the lines of "If you want a copy send me an email".