We’ve written a book.
I don’t remember how we did it or how we managed to reach nearly 100,000 words in length, but it came about somehow and that’s something worth celebrating. I use the pronoun “we” because Katie was a big part of the project and in ways that transcended occasional opinions. It was a joint effort if for no other reason than the topic of the work was the two of us, and the unlikely, incredible life that we have experienced. Now comes the hard part.
It’s one thing to summon up discipline to write each day (though my discipline required work over four years to reach completion!) but entering the realm of publishing takes the project to an entirely new place. I know very little about production, distribution or marketing a book, especially one which I wrote primarily as a memoir for our family and maybe a few friends. It probably doesn’t matter if anyone else ever reads it. But publishers- even the ones who get paid primarily by their authors- are intent on making at least some commissions on their titles and that means embracing the entire publishing process, including attempts at broader distribution. And I find it to be a scary place.
I never anticipated actually paying someone to publish something I had written. I always assumed that if I ever wrote anything good enough it would generate financial reward to me. It feels somehow fake to me, that my book may have not been chosen for the quality of its prose but rather for the fees I am required to pay up front. The term “vanity press” always left me cold and I’m not sure that I ever read a book that had been published that way.
This is a different age, however, and so am I. In the early 70’s Katie gave me the opportunity to write full-time while she worked. I used a great deal of that time corresponding with agents and publishers, trying to entice people to read my short stories and a novel, looking for some kind of foot in a door toward publication. The repetition was endless and mostly frustrating. Today, however, I can e-mail a manuscript and have a thumbs-up by week’s end. I can hold a completed book within six months with a depleted bank account in five. But for an aging author, it might be the best- indeed, only- game in town.
Now that I’ve survived the perseverance of writing and the ignominy of pay-as-you-play, I’m required to confront the unfamiliar world of publishing. It’s a world of fonts and fabrics, paper and pictures, covers and chapters, edits and eBooks. It has been suggested to me that no matter how many times I have re-read my words or had family members proofread it, the publishing team will uncover still more errors of vocabulary or usage or spelling. (How dare anyone challenge my syntax?). There is work that will be done on the manuscript for my fees, but I wonder if I really want any. I’m leery.
Writing the book has truly become a labor of love, literally a labor of love, as it has chronicled our lives over the past 53 years or so. We pored over hundreds of photographs that told our story pictorially, triggering memories and laughter that had been dormant for too long. With its completion I am already feeling its absence from my daily work routine, sad to send it off to other eyes which might not be as gentle with the story of our lives as we have been. Even with the editorial authority to reject any changes to the manuscript that might be suggested, I feel as though I have placed an intimate part of us into unknown hands.
But it’s one more new experience to add to our continuing tale, and its uncertainty keeps us alert. A long time has elapsed since I submitted anything book-length for publishing. Indeed, our book is the first since I labored with all those return envelopes and rejection notices more than forty years ago. I wonder whether the editors are any friendlier now. Stay tuned….
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