My First Book Debuts

inspire yourself to write

An idea pines inside you for writing your first book, but you just can't seem to get started, or find the time. Demands from work are pressing, and/or the kids need attention. Fill in the blank with your excuse.

Writing a book is a long process (average two years) of long hours, countless revisions and more long hours that extend beyond writing to marketing, not by your publisher but you. Yes, publishers today expect authors to take an active role in publicizing their book (think book tour; think dead book).

No one starts out writing a book without imagining it will zoom to the top of the best-seller list; there's too much work involved, and who would ever say, "I'm getting up at 4 a.m. today to write a flop." But will you roll your eyes open at 4 a.m. to write a best-seller? Not if you're not inspired.

While inspiration comes from within, it doesn't hurt to reach out to a writer's group in your area and take a class, which is a traditional approach. But inspiration can strike in other ways. For me, I found inspiration to write my first book on craiglists, but I wasn't searching for inspiration. Our family suffered a huge financial crisis a couple of years ago, and craigslist seemed like an ideal place to find a weekend job.

What I found was an ad written by a national author who needed gardeners. Since I love to garden, I clicked through. To qualify for wacking weeds, I had to submit an essay that reflected my best writing. In return, the author would pay me $10 an hour and treat me and other chosen writers to lunch while she shared her secrets about writing and getting published. The author cloaked her identity until she chose her gardeners. [That's me, sitting down with my arm around the poodle, with the other writer gardeners. Carole's in the back row, second from the left.] 

I submitted an essay about discovering that my son had a disability, autism. I got the gig. And the author—Carole Fungaroli Sargent, author of Traditional Degrees for Nontraditional Students—followed through, recommending a variety of resources, which I'll share with you. 

• How to Write and Sell Your Personal Experiences by Lois Duncan. In How to Write, Duncan shows how to tailor your personal experiences for the larger world. Since Carole recommended Duncan as an author, I have become a big fan, scurrying to the lower floor at Borders to buy her young adult fiction novels. She also wrote Who Killed My Daughter, a gripping memoir about her unsolved murder. [To this day, Lois is still searching for her daughter's murderer.]
• Selected articles from The Writer: The Breakthrough column, featuring Christine Contillo's rise from public health nursing supervisor to New York Times columnist (October 2004). And, the How I Write column, revealing the tips of author Emma Donoghue.
• Page 44 from Thinking Like Your Editor by Susan Rabiner and Alfred Fortunato. Point: Don't say your book will be for everyone—the books that have the best chance of succeeding with readers are those written with the needs of a well-defined core audience in mind.

FRIDAY: do you need to read your competition

your letter of inquiry

In grade school, I asked Mom to sew me a nun's habit (as in actress Sally Field). She did and I wore it, bedroom door closed, teaching my imaginary friends everything I had learned in parochial school that day. Nun would be the last word my real friends would use to describe me as an adult, but there is one thing I share from my youth, and that is a desire to help others.

So today's lesson is on the query letter. This one-page, single-spaced letter is one of your most important marketing tools. Your book proposal is the other. The lead has got to be the grabber, just like in any hard news story.

You can't wait too long after the first graph, like some feature writers do, to draw in the reader. You just don't have the time—or attention—of a literary agent (read The Attention Economy by Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck.

Here was my query-letter opener for my book, Act Early Against Autism (which was retitled from Almost Normal, but that's another blog).

" Every year, one out of 166 babies born in the United States will develop some form of autism, the fastest growing developmental disability in America.

In 1999, my son, Leo, was one of them. After four years of treatment, he has recovered. He’s almost normal. Leo now lives in my world, fully engaged, a happy boy, not too shy to call me “missy pants” when he doesn’t get his way."

In writing your query letter, make sure you show and not just tell. Here's what I mean: After I tell the reader that Leo became "mainstreamed," which means he goes to a regular school without extra supports, I give an example of how he acted before the start of early intervention.

"If only the school knew that this once was a boy who pitched his forehead into the sand, scooping up wet fistfuls and dribbling them on either side of his temples; his idea of beach play."

Think about it this way. Edit down a cinematic scene in your head to one or two sentences, much like a movie house does when it edits a motion picture for a trailer. Example:

"The Leo I see today is a little boy who greets me with a panda bear mask he made in camp, jumping into his car seat and saying, “Mom, I want a playdate with Sofia,” and expressing disappointment that it’s not today. Every time he asks to play with another child, I think back to the days when he walked in circles on the Oriental rug, like he was trying to figure something out, unwilling, no, unable to play."

The purpose of showing rather than telling is not just good writing, it offers the agent some insight into whether you can write with a voice, or just dryly recite facts.

When I sent off my query letter, I included my book proposal along with it. I figured if an agent wanted to read it I'd save him or her the extra step of having to send it. If the proposal wasn't of interest, I didn't care if the agent pitched everything. Forget the SASE (self addressed, stamped envelope). Agents don't want to be bothered.

While a well crafted query letter will at least catch the attention of an agent, it's your idea or story that will sell. Remember, to speak with your feelings.

PS: The cool Web tool that created the visual synonyms for "query" comes from Visual Thesaurus. It rocks (and hardly costs a thing)!

MONDAY: Your book proposal and disclosing your secrets

how painful was that

I think David Meerman Scott, author of The New Rules of PR Marketing, is right when he says that you are likely to hear a "deafening silence" after you publish your first blog. I hope it's not like that after my first book debuts in March 2008.

Okay, the subject matter is a downer—autism—but it is my first book, and what I went through to get a literary agent and a publisher is no different than what you will go through if you are an aspiring author. One exception: If you're really writing a novel you'll need to write the whole shebang, as opposed to nonfiction or self-help, in which two chapters will suffice.

You'll also feel the pain of writing, so I recommend that whatever you write you have a passion about it and stick to a writing schedule. My passion is autism, more precisely helping families act early against autism. My son, who will celebrate his eighth birthday in a few weeks, was diagnosed with this vexing brain disorder at two years old. I write of his recovery (no miracle cures or quick fixes here) and share my odyssey in a book that blends memoir and prescriptive advice.

I hope that if you are personally touched by autism in your family, or if you know someone who is, you'll read or recommend my book, Act Early Against Autism: Give Your Child a Fighting Chance from the Start (Penguin-Perigee). It has garnered endorsements from T. Berry Brazelton, M.D.; and Bob Wright, cofounder of Autism Speaks. Fred. R. Volkmar, M.D., director of the Yale University Child Study Center, wrote the foreword.

I don't have a Masters of Fine Arts degree, yet I feel pretty good about what I've done. And if you'll allow me some bragging rights, my book went to auction, garnering close to a six-figure advance (you don't get it all at once). Before I go any further, I'd like to thank my agent extraordinaire, Joelle Delbourgo, my editor at Perigee, Marian Lizzi, and my mentor Barbara Esstman, a fab writer and author of several books, including The Other Anna: A Novel.

With that backdrop, I hope my credibility as an author will shine through.