Read half a dozen books about PR, marketing and book publicity. As expected there’s as many number of strategies on this as there are about writing books. Apparently it’s quite rare for publishers to pay for, or organize, tours. The economics do not work out - the $2000 or $3000 it might cost to bring an author somewhere need to be balanced out by $2k in increased sales because of the tour. Few authors are well known enough to draw many people to book signings or lectures… so authors tend to be on their own.

My plan: I’m a good public speaker and I like speaking, so lets try to get some speaking gigs together. I negotiated a date with the publisher (should they be able to help out), and send out mail to people I knew at various companies. Asked on my mailing list. Eventually built a list of 5 or 6 gigs - enough to warrant a 3 day trip down the coast to San Fransisco. My expenses are out of pocket, but so what. Buy the ticket, take the ride. Write a book, go talk to people about it. That’s what I’m telling myself. $600 isn’t much to pay to learn about how to do these things - I’ll have a clue for the next book about what the right approach to these things are.

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Fed-Ex package came a few minutes ago - inside was… the book! No note or anything, just the book in all it’s paperback glory. Ran around the house, showed it to Max several dozen times (being a dog he didn’t quite understand, but joined in all the running around). I then did a secret writer dance and screamed a mighty woohoo! that probably scared the neighbors. It’s a good day.

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To date, I’ve sent the book proposal to 13 publishers and editors. Current success rate: 0%.

This isn’t a bad number. There are tons of stories of 50, 100, 200 rejections before finding a publisher. Pirsig’s Zen and the art of Motorcycle maintaince had over 100 rejections. It’s such a speculative industry, with such high barriers, that these numbers are normal. I’m not giving up yet. In fact the larger the number of rejections I get before I get it published, the better the story I’ll have to tell :)

But for now I don’t plan on focusing on the London book until I have an interested publisher. There’s enough of a book there to land a deal - finishing the book won’t make a difference.

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Each of these QC reviews took an enormous amount of time. I sat down and read through the entire book on each one. No joke. I sat with red pen in hand, and read through everything. It’s the only way I can edit - I have to know what came before, reading it in order, and do it in big sittings. Otherwise I don’t have enough context to know what’s redundant with the last chapter or not.

It’s tough work - Like driving late at night when you’re tired, as soon as i get bored I have to snap out of it and focus - I’m the writer here. I’m the one that has to know what the hell he’s doing.

For QC2, effectively the 4th draft of the book, I spent as much time as possible cutting - crossing out sentences or entire paragraphs. The most effective editing is just ripping shit out. A clunky paragraph, or series of paragraphs is often best served by death. Just rip it out. No one will know what else I was going to say except for me - and in many cases they’re better off not knowing.

But it’s been brutal. I totally underestimated how much emotional energy the last 1/3rd of the book process would take.

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