Confessions of an Amateur Writer, Part IV

On each of my return trips to Uganda from 2012 through 2014, I brought with me new or revised chapters for Henry to read.  He filled in missing details and explained what he was thinking and feeling at critical junctures.  He was getting very excited about the prospect of the manuscript becoming a book.

Along my educational book-writing journey previously described in parts one, two, and three of this “Confessions of an Amateur Writer” series, I learned that perhaps the most important document a wannabe author writes is not the agent-seeking query letter, or even the manuscript itself.  Instead, the critical piece is the book proposal.

For established authors, this can often be dispensed with because publishers already know the author’s writing ability and platform.  But for amateurs, the book proposal is the only thing a potential publisher will ever read.  Once again, Amazon came through for me.

As I was digesting this very helpful book, I was chatting with an old friend (Jenny Rough) from my Pepperdine/Kirkland days who’s since abandoned the practice of law in favor of writing.  Not only does she write all kinds of articles and pieces for a wide variety of audiences, but she’s in the middle of writing her own book.  And she has friends in the business.  One of those friends shared with her a copy of what her friend considered to be a truly outstanding book proposal.  Jenny graciously shared it with me.

Soon thereafter, I mimicked this exemplar and wrote my own book proposal, which had the following Table of Contents:

Overview and Outline ………………………………3

About the Author………………………………….…8

Target Audience and Competing Books ………..9

Marketing and Promotion …………………………14

Manuscript Specifications …………………………..22

Annotated Table of Contents ……………………..23

Sample Chapters

One ………………………………………….29

Two ………………………………………….30

Three ………………………………………..36

Eighteen …………………………………….47

I was pretty proud of myself when I was finished – it actually looked like a real book proposal written by a real writer.  While it is customary to include the first few chapters at the end of the book proposal, I decided to include chapter eighteen also, which was then the final chapter, so I could prove I had substantially completed the manuscript.

But the question Curtis Yates had previously asked continued to eat at me.  Why not wait until the elements of the story played out before trying to finish the book?  While Henry had been released from prison, and while I had argued his appeal before a Ugandan court, the ruling hadn’t been issued and Henry’s dream of attending medical school was still unfulfilled.  Additionally, the nationwide impact of Henry’s case and my subsequent engagement with the Ugandan judiciary was still in unfolding.

So while all of this was playing out, I continued to edit and supplement the manuscript.  This meant more three-day writing trips to Buffalo Bill’s Casino (my teenage son Joshua accompanied me once and greatly helped me figure out which of the legal portions were too technical), and more imposing on close friends.  One of my former students who served as a Nootbaar Fellow in Uganda for four months, Jeff Wyss, was particularly helpful and encouraging.  All of his comments and suggestions – even when I didn’t like them – were spot on.

Eventually, I gave the Yates firm the book proposal and the now-swollen manuscript.

Much better, but still not good enough.  Your manuscript is 129,000 words.  Anything over 100,000 in this genre will scare publishers away.  You really should aim for 60,000-75,000.  Just because it happened, doesn’t mean it should be in the book.  Have you considered hiring an editor?  And the book proposal looks way too much like a legal document.  Your chapter-by-chapter summaries need to be written like the book and need to tell the story.  Way too sterile.

While those weren’t their exact words, that’s exactly what they meant.  What I heard was, “Take half of your book and throw it in the trash.”  While it felt like an uppercut to the trachea, it wasn’t a knockout blow.  Instead, I took it on as a personal challenge – I felt like I was getting close and I didn’t want to admit failure by hiring a ghostwriter and pretending that I actually wrote the book myself.

I really tried to take to heart what he said – Just because it happened doesn’t mean it should be in the book.  Each time I read through the manuscript, I trimmed away a few thousand words.  After eight or nine times passes, I was down to 89,000.  I refused to cut anything else because I felt I would lose critical pieces if I did.  As I was editing, I also convinced the Yates firm to send me two successful book proposals in the memoir genre (the other sample proposal I had was in the reference book category).

These excellent proposals were structured a bit differently, but had all the same elements.  Once again, I patterned my proposal after these models and then re-submitted the entire package to the Yates firm.  This happened in the spring of 2014.

During the summer, I got the answer I was hoping for.  Almost.  The Yates firm liked the proposal, but the book was still too long and needed to be professionally edited before it was sent out.  They explained that the editor would not be a ghostwriter, but would instead help tighten and shorten the book.  With this clarification, I eagerly accepted their recommendation of Kris Bearss in Nashville.

During my first phone conversation with Kris, I learned she’d previously been an editor for two major book labels before becoming a free-lance writer and editor.  She was also in the process of editing a version of Bob Goff’s Love Does for a Young Adult audience, so she was familiar with some of the work I was doing in Uganda.

Small world.

Truth be told, I was very nervous about what Kris would try to do – I was highly protective of the manuscript in its current form.  I was quite skeptical that much could be done to shorten it without losing important story elements.

As usual, I was wrong.  Kris was phenomenal.  She sent me chunks at a time via Microsoft Word’s “track changes” function.  I would accept most of her changes and then push back on a few of them.  Sometimes she would push right back at me, but most of the time, she would find a way to let me keep what I wanted, but still make it better and shorter.  By the time we finished, the manuscript was 78,000 words and much better.

In November of 2014, the Yates firm officially said yes and sent me a contract.  I was now officially wannabe author with a real agent.  But I was still a wannabe author without a book contract.

In the next (and last) installment in this series, I will discuss my final meeting with the Yates firm before the book proposal was sent to publishers, and the typical terms of an agency and publishing contract.

Thanks, again, for reading.