Inside The Writer’s Mind

What’s that you say?  You want to know about my forthcoming book?  Okay, it’s titled So Why Have You Never Been Married.  The subtitle is still subject to negotiation.  I want the subtitle to be Ten Insights Into Why He Hasn’t Wed, because that is what the book is about.  But the sales people want the subtitle Ten Insights Into Why He Won’t Wed, because they think that will sell more books.  It’s more controversial.  You can probably already guess who is going to win this battle.  Did I mention that publishing is a business? 

When a publisher commits to publishing a book, especially the book of a relatively unknown author (i.e., yours truly), one of the things they do is “pitch” the book to their sales force for feedback and suggestions.  Sometimes those suggestions involve changing the subtitle, the book cover and even the contents of the book–all of which happened to my book.  Now the way it was told to me is that when these sales people walk into Barnes and Nobel or Borders and speak with the buyer there, they represent maybe 200 books at any one time.  Out of those books they will “push” only a handful, and if you want them to push your book, and perhaps see it on the bookshelf of your local bookstore, you pretty much have to do what they say.

Dilemma number one: you spend the better part of two years working on the “book of your life” and when it comes time to pitch it to the sales people, they request that you make major changes to the book that dramatically impact it—and not to your liking—but it will increase the sales prospects for the book.  What do you do?  There is no right answer.  But I decided to listen to the sales people and accommodate their wishes for two reasons.  First, I want as many people as possible to read my book, even if it is not 100% to my original vision.  And who is to say that my original vision for the book was right on anyway?  Perhaps the new, modified version of the book is actually a better book.  The other reason I decided to go along is that I know there will come a time in the future, several books from now, that I will not have to be as flexible.  Remember, I have a lot of books in me.

So Why Have You Never Been Married is a book of conversations with never-married men over 40 who have not yet taken the plunge.  My interest in the topic is purely personal: I am one of them.  But even though I am one of them, I could not readily articulate exactly why I have never married, and I really did want to know the answer.  The first thing I did was search for a book on that very subject.  I found exactly one, written over ten years ago by a psychologist.  It did not answer that question for me.  I figured if I could just ask the question that became the title of the book to enough other similarly situated men, I would hear my answer from at least one of them and then I would know.  That’s when I decided to write the book.  And what two questions did I need to know the answer to before I began to write?  Question 1: who will read the book?  Answer: never married men AND women over 40.  Turns out there are about 12 million of them.  Not a bad niche.  Question 2: why will they choose my book?  Answer: because the only other book readily available on the subject is over a decade old.

In the course of writing the book, I placed a survey online for never-married men over 40, and to my pleasant surprise over 1,500 men responded by taking the survey.  From that group I randomly selected 33 men and had conversations with them to discover why they had not married.  Those conversations comprise the bulk of the book.  (Surveys and interviews are types of research and if you ever hope to be an author, you should learn, no make that love, to do research.  More about that later.)  But the book is not just about the research and the conversations, it is also a journey of self discovery.  It is about my own quest for the answer to the title of the book.  Do you want to know what I found?  You’ll have to read the book.

Now you probably think that with such an interesting topic, a well-defined market and so little competition, the agents and publishers would welcome my book with open arms.  Not so fast grasshopper.  I contacted 66 agents with a pretty darn good query letter (more about those later) if I must say so, and guess how many turned me down?  All of them!  I contacted about a dozen publishers and guess how many of them turned me down?  All but one.  I was extremely lucky.  There are no sure things in the publishing business.

I am proud of the book and I cannot wait until the publication date: April 28, 2008.  But that is still a long time from now, and the best way I know to make the time pass quickly is…you guessed it…to start writing something else.  And since I am soon to be a published author of two books, both on very diverse subjects (how many authors do you think are out there who have written books on high technology AND relationships?), I feel as though I now have “permission” to write about anything, regardless of whether or not I am an expert on the subject.  I give you that permission too.

What is keeping you from writing something right now?  I don’t want to hear from you; I want you to write something.
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