***On Writing and the Business of Writing

Written By: Lynn Wiese Sneyd

I was sitting on the plane, heading back to Milwaukee from Albuquerque. My husband and I had been contemplating a move to the southwest for some time and we had finally decided to take a trip to New Mexico to check it the lay of the land. Though we eventually moved to the high desert of Tucson, something unexpected came out of that excursion: a book.

While I sat crunching peanuts and looking out the window, an idea struck for a parenting book. I had never written a book, much less anything else, but I had always wanted a career connected to writing and publishing, and at the time was hoping to get out of financial sales and into writing. I outlined a book in ten sentences. Soon after returning to the daily routine, I discovered one of my business associates had a sister who worked for a literary agent in New York City. I wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but I sent her the bullet-pointed outline and a week later she called. She loved the idea, said that I would need experts to endorse it since I didn’t have a medical background and the book focused on health. Could I send a book proposal?

Huh?

Well, it took five years of figuring out what to do and how to do it, five years replete with mistakes, delays, frustrations, before a full-fledged proposal materialized and garnered an agent’s attention and then a publisher’s.

The next round of “huh?” came when the publisher informed me that it was time to gather endorsements for the cover. Really? The author does that? Yet another round came when the publisher said, “Time to market.” Really? You’re not kidding when you say the publicist will help for only six weeks?

And so I learned the publicity side of the book business. After turning in my manuscript, I had the good fortune of finding a job as an event planner at a bookstore. Hosting signings, promoting signings, dealing with distribution – all has proven useful.

Now, as I help aspiring authors and published authors, I see the same errors being made that I made, and hear the same “huh” that I uttered way too often. The good news: the world of writing and publishing and book promotion is not rocket science. So if you’re interested in writing – in sharing your story, your expertise, your creativity, your talent – tune in occasionally. I’ll try to offer useful tidbits on writing and the business of writing. So many Boomers have much to share in the form of articles, essays, poems, screenplays, and books. It helps, however, to know what to do without taking the long rocky road there.

Until next time, write on.

You may respond to Lynn in the “Leave a Comment” section below.

Tags: aspiring authors, boomers, literary agent, publicist