Book process

In response to Janna’s questions about how to get a book published:

When you approach a publisher you have to have more than a general theme. If you are writing fiction, you generally need a finished book before anyone will consider it. With non-fiction, your proposal needs as many specifics as possible – on your thesis, how you will back it up with numbers and facts, who you already have interviewed and who else you will talk to, how what you are proposing differs from what others have already published, who you believe will buy your book, and on and on. All that takes lots of work and time. A publisher has to see precisely what the book will look like and how good a writer you are.

I don’t say this to discourage you or anyone from trying. Rather, it is a warning that book-writing is very hard work and that getting anything published these days is very difficult, especially by a press that reaches a mass market. So only try it if you have the time, you have a strong enough ego to withstand rejection, and, most important, you are so passionate about your topic that you can’t not write about it.

I had six friends read Satchel cover-to-cover before I sent it in. They ranged, as I explain in my Acknowledgments, from a Pulitzer-Prize winning biographer to journalists to an expert on the Negro Leagues. Other friends and colleagues read bits and pieces. Once it got to Random House, the terrific editor who bought the book did a rigorous edit, as did a series of other editors.

The good news is that each reader offered up ways to make it better. The frustration is that all that reading and revising takes time, which is why it is a full year after I submitted it that Satchel finally is about to hit the stores. That happens next week, on June 9.

Was it worth all that work? I leave that to you.