Maybe you’ve heard of NaNoWriMo. It’s National Novel Writing Month. The idea is to use November to write like a mofo. You buckle down and really get those words on the page, just hurl them out, and maybe, just maybe, by the time you’re done, you’ve got the bones of a novel — or whatever your form you’d like your book to take. I did NaNoWriMo one year and came out with a solid 26,000 words about my dog. I didn’t know I had that much to say about Harley, he’s only 12 pounds, how could he generate so many words? But I produced a short work about his first year with me — the whys and hows of his adoption, and how he evolved from Mr. Scared of Everything to the guy he is now.
(The guy he is now is snoozling contentedly, tucked in his blanket, while I get ready for a conference call, apply coffee to my face, and watch this stormy December day throw the hummingbird feeder around.)
The great thing about NaNoWriMo is it teaches you how to sustain writing over time. It’s a practice. You get in front of the keyboard and you write as best you can towards novel length work. A few years later, when my friend Alex asked me to write an essay about my early travels, I found I had more than the standard 1600 words in me. I could not stop when the essay was written. My first draft, at 69,000 words took about three months to write. I won’t say it was easy, treading the path of memory is never easy, but the bare bones work of writing wasn’t hard at all. Alex had tapped this well of memory and it the words just spilled out, page after page. Before I knew it, I had a solid draft memoir about my dirtbag travel adventures, ready for … something.
This fall instead of writing I decided to use November, NaNoWriMo, to pitch my memoir. Again. I had down two previous solid runs of pitching, about 25 pitches each, to the same results all around. I got a series of canned rejections. Those were easy to take. I got a lot of silence equals no. That was a bit more confusing. And I got a handful of pained notes praising my work but telling me that the agent “just can’t sell it.”
These accolades were really hard. One agent called my story gutsy, another told me I knew how to put the words down, another told me how compelling the work was. “The market for travel memoir is so small,” they’d tell me. “You’re not famous enough to sell this kind of story.” One agent told me — after I’d asked — that I might have better luck shopping the work as fiction, something I was open to, with the small annoyance that the story is, well, true. At least as true as I can remember given that it takes place in the early 80s. If my book had all these virtues, wasn’t I worth the risk? Apparently not. “It’s not you it’s me.” Or the market, rather.
I had to take some time off. Constant rejection can really wear a person down. But with NaNoWriMo lighting up my online world, I decided to get back on the horse. I would pitch every day in November. If nothing came of it, I would start again in February. I’d give up on finding an agent and search for a small press. It wasn’t my first choice — I had dreams of a New York publisher, but obviously, that was not working out.
Back up. In September, I recieved an email from an acquistions editor — a person who finds books for a press. He told me he’d been following my work for a while and had seen, intermittently, that I’d posted about a book I was working on. He wanted to know what was up with it. I told him: nothing. I had all the pieces, but was still shopping it. I sent him my pitch, and then, my manuscript with the full proposal. Nothing happened.
Slow forward to November I followed up. “Hey, I’m pitching, I though you should know I’m back to trying to sell this thing.” He apologized for the delay in getting back to me and praised my work. “Here we go again,” I thought, and I marked the press as ‘open’ in my big spreadsheet of queries. Row 51, submitted.
Then I went back to piling up the rejections. I mean submissions. 55. 60. 70. 75.
On November 26th, I got the offer from the acquistions agent. “…this book has a great voice. I’d love the opportunity to help bring it to publication.” A few days later, I signed the contract. The book comes out at the end of 2020, exact date TBD.
I recieved 24 rejections. 51 of my queries went unanswered. I pitched for a year and a half, though I took a lot of breaks. It’s slightly surprising that the pitch that worked came to me, rather than from me, but it’s proof that whatever I was doing worked. Now, I have to get author headshots and write a catalog listing and present suggestions for the cover and oh, just a bunch of othet things. Also, I have to, you know, finish my book.
Oh, hey, you guys. I got a book deal. Sign up here to find out when it comes out.
Congratulations, Pam!
My first offer of a book contract came to me unsolicited and before I had even thought about writing a book, as a result of the visibility and following my writing had developed on Usenet, not as a result of any “pitch” I had made.
That was unusual in 1995, but wouldn’t be so today.
One way to look at it is that writing and self-publishing this blog has been a (successful) part of your work of “pitching” yourself.
Perhaps seeing it that way may change your assessment of the long-term return on your investment of time and effort in blogging and other activities that are neither purely self-promotional nor immediately remunerative.
The good thing is that I never started this blog to do … anything really. Other than get some stories out into the world. I never aggressively monitized it, and while I did do a bit of junketing while that was a thing, I was often a bad investment for PR, too many questions, not interested in the hotel-as-story approach, hell, you know. But I’d be the first to admit that this blog has been invaluable in honing my skill as a writer and getting me work.
What you said. Thank you.
Thank you for sharing your journey and including all the not so pretty parts. I love seeing other writers tell their success stories, especially when they’re honest about how much effort, time, and attempts it takes. Some people make it seem so easy and wrapped in a perfect bow and that’s not always the case.
Congratulations to you!
Congrats! I’m so glad it worked out in the end.
Congrats! I look forward to seeing it in the wild.