A writer must have a website, a website must have a blog, and a blog must have a topic…

But I am anti-blog. So. Welcome to my anti-blog. The topic: two years of attempts to sell my third nonfiction book project, “Anything Worth Doing.” The goal: to save other writers and would-be writers the misconceptions and resulting missteps easy prior successes helped me make. The anti-blogger method: short, serial, blogstyle entries that should be read in chronological order, i.e. bookstyle.

read on…

[Note on 4/13/10: I get a LOT of spammed faux comments here. I'm not computer savvy enough to filter them out automatically. I TRY to sift out the genuine feedback and dialogue from the mess but if I am slow to post yours or miss it altogether, I apologize in advance.]

The medium is the message, they told us in journalism school eons ago. I liked the alliteration but disagreed with the point. The human mind is flexible and independent, easily distinguishing between channels and what runs in them, I argued. And when a channel does not serve, we do not become its servant. We change it, I asserted.

I’m older now. What the human mind can do and tends to are not the same.

So I am anti-blog. The form is overused to the point of ubiquitous pointlessness.

I’m not universally anti-blog though. The concise, link-littered blog style, designed to be consumed in three bites like a fast food burger, is well-suited to many acts of communication. Short book reviews, news roundups, niche interests like gardening, investing, or fitness can all be intelligently and usefully blogged, their messages unharmed by fast-food burger-style consumption.

A blogger can also share an adventure or a challenge, say, a solo sailing trip or a year in the Green Zone in Baghdad or their life as a famous whatever. The immediacy of the form appeals to the voyeur in all of us. “What is it like to be me?” such a blogger seems to say. “Well, today it’s like this.” Gulp and go.

What the blog is antithetical to, in my experience, is deep, careful thinking, or the narration of a complex series of interlinked events or ideas, or any subject which requires the reader to absorb background before moving forward.

And yet a writer must have a website, a website must have a blog, and a blog must have a topic. And the topic I can most usefully write about is exactly this last kind of subject. In order to be useful I need to begin at the beginning, several years ago, and write until I reach a solution I haven’t yet created.

So this is an anti-blog. It is an anti-blog about why a skilled, moderately seasoned if not financially astute writer decided against advice to write a book guaranteed to be a hard sell to publishers; how I wrote and then tried to sell it and, to date, have failed as everyone but me expected. That will bring me to the present. Then I will write forward until I either sell the manuscript or with an aching in my heart, self-publish it. And I’ll let you know how it all works out.

I want to write this anti-blog for several reasons. One is that there are lessons for me in writing back through this journey.

Another is that computers have lent an ease to writing that brings out the hidden writer in unprecedented numbers of people who are, in my opinion, too often preyed upon by the faux-publishing industry and its “How To” hangers-on.

I want people toying with writing for publication to be able to follow me along this road and, in the end, be better able to decide if they want that road after all. Too many people who love to write subject themselves to the corrosive forces of the marketplace when their needs might be better met in a closed circle of admiring family and friends.

I also want unpublished writers who know their job will not be done until their work is purchased and read to have the benefit of my mistakes and missteps, especially if I decide to self-publish. It’s not fun to work hard at half your job and find yourself unable to accomplish the other half. So when I eventually succeed, I want them to know how it happened.

There are so many half-truths and anecdotes-turned-pronouncements in this industry. I’d like to share what I’ve learned about some of those.

So follow me if you wish. You’ll start by following me to the beginning, with an idea for what I wanted to be my second book. My trusted sounding boards didn’t swoon over it. I wrote it anyway. We’ll catch up to the present day in 500ish word increments, one or two a week. Once I reach the present, I will add segments only as developments occur.

Oh, and you should probably test-drive my assertion that I wrote a solid, well-crafted manuscript for what will one day be a neat little book. You can read the preface here. If you don’t find yourself reading to the end and wishing you could continue, you should probably not read this anti-blog either. : D

In 2001 I woke to a fact now so obvious to me I am puzzled how it ever escaped me: if you write and publish a book, people will read it. And they will make decisions about you, your politics, the depth of your thinking, and whether they want to read you again, based on what they read. In webspeak, every book you publish brands you.

This realization was prompted by my first published book. The project had begun in 1999 when a journalist friend who kept a file on cougar attacks happened to find out I was writing an article about cougar researchers for a magazine. We quickly – perhaps too quickly — decided to write a book together.

Both of us were working writers — he the editor of a smallish newspaper, me a magazine and newspaper freelancer — but neither of us had written a book. Our preliminary market research said that the book that hadn’t yet been written would focus on cougar encounters and attacks. It would “sell like that!” we told each other, snapping our fingers.

And it did. Agentless, we took our proposal and sample chapters to ten publishers. St. Martin’s, Johnson Books in Colorado, and Sasquatch in Seattle all said yes.

Then we went back to the agent – I’m going to call her R – who’d told us she didn’t see a book in our proposal but if we happened to convince a publisher otherwise we should let her know.

She agreed to represent us. On her advice we went with the regional publisher Sasquatch because they offered the largest advance, $10,000. The editor at St. Martin’s – name of Marc Resnick — told my writing partner and me that we were idiots to go with a regional house when a national publisher was offering, but he wished us luck.

Fast forward two years and the book was on shelves. The publisher insisted on calling it ‘Cat Attacks: True Stories and Hard Lessons from Cougar Country.’ I’d been arguing for an approach and title that didn’t slam us squarely into the Outdoor Life scary animal story camp, like maybe ‘Track of the Lion,’ but in the end what I wanted most was to see my name on a book jacket, so I hadn’t kicked up much fuss.

Almost as soon as it was too late to change it I realized I hated this book. It not only looked like a bunch of scary animal stories, it mostly was. They had been fun to write, sad and exciting and disturbing. But was that a good enough reason to publish them? Surely we could have been more responsible with our subject matter, I thought. Even though we cautioned against being frightened of cougars because of stories about rare cougar attacks in our book, even though we wrote that the biggest reason we were telling these stories was because they were simply great stories, the implied message was clear: Cougars must be a problem or there wouldn’t be a book.

Fast forward again: It was 2006 and “Cat Attacks,” although it was Sasquatch’s top seller the year it came out, had slowed way down since my coauthor and I stopped supporting it. Sasquatch let it go out of print and all rights reverted to us.

Which suited me: I wanted another crack at the material. We could rewrite the book as a genre buster, I argued to my coauthor. Use attack stories, sure, but not as the center of the book. They would be merely part of an exploration of a larger question: Will humans willingly share living space with big predators?

Since humans are rapidly gobbling space it seemed to me a burning question. If the answer is no, it’s hard to imagine how any amount of legislated protection would shield North America’s big predators, from wolves to cougars to grizzlies to black bears. That serious question would frame a responsible, thoughtful approach to the subject matter, I said. And inside that frame we could still tell these great, exciting stories.

My coauthor was not interested. He was done with the topic and not unhappy with the book as it stood. I could go forward with it alone with his blessing.

A week later Falcon, a Globe Pequot imprint based in Montana, had bought the project.

The revision I did with Falcon was close to what I had intended, but not close enough to please me. It was smarter and more thoughtful than the original. Most of the chapters were not built around attacks on humans.

However many readers still felt the book foregrounded attacks and rightly so. A writer I greatly respect named Chris Bolgiano, who also writes about cougars, lambasted it. She told me the book would result in the unnecessary killing of more cougars.

The bottom line is, I was not yet a good enough writer to handle sensational material in a thoughtful way. Also problematic was the fact that my editor at Falcon had been determined to capitalize on the very sensationalism I’d hoped to downplay. He was a heavy-penned but light-handed editor, so when I could articulate a good reason for overruling his extensive edits, he gave ground. The trouble was me: Often I could not articulate my genre-busting vision and the reasons it seemed a good idea.

One day my editor emailed me with his proposed title: “Stalked by a Mountain Lion.”
I howled. He gave me a chance to come up with a better title. I proudly dusted off my old “Track of the Lion.” He gave both titles to the Barnes and Noble rep, and the rep immediately picked “Stalked” for a title.

And that was that. You don’t argue with the Barnes and Noble rep, my editor said. If it made me feel better he’d let me write the subtitle.

No amount of howling had any further impact. I reread my contract. As far as I could tell I had no contractual right to veto a title.
The book was released in 2007 under the title, “Stalked by a Mountain Lion: Fact, Fear and the Uncertain Future of Cougars in America.” On the cover, a cougar stares into the reader’s eyes.

By my score, that was strike two. I had tried to deliver a thoughtful, responsible but compelling narrative and had only  partially succeeded. But the book as titled, with that cover and the words “Deadly Cougar Encounters” highlighted on the back, made a promise I also didn’t deliver on: the book appeared to be but now was not a rehash of scary animal stories.

Sigh.

Flashback to 2002; the first cougar book was out and I needed a new book to work on.

I had learned the hard way that sensational material in the hands of someone new to the writer’s craft is risky. It’s like trying to manage a magic lamp inhabited by a mischievous genie. (I had been writing professionally for about four years when my coauthor and I decided to write that first book. Some people learn fast but I do not, so four years hadn’t taught me as much as you might suppose).

At the time I had just retired from a longtime summer job as a wilderness whitewater raft guide. As I moped through my new, town-based life, I didn’t understand why I was so sad. Guiding involved a lot of dishwashing and  guest mollifying and a little bit of excitement. Now I was free to, say, keep a garden. And write more. And seek out wilderness on my own, something I’d not had time for as a guide. But of course being a guide, living and working in wilderness and not just visiting there, had become integral to my self image.

One day I remembered someone else whose longtime river career had recently ended. His name was Clancy Reece, and not only had he been a raft guide until age 50, outlasting me by a decade, but nearly everyone who had known the guy had admired him, in some cases to an almost laughable degree. He was the subject of improbable stories which made him sound like Paul Bunyan on a caffeine buzz. His career had ended, not by choice, but when the river he loved took his life.

That was the book I would write, I decided almost the moment the man’s name popped into my head.

First I went to bookstores. I quickly saw that nothing quite like my book existed but that similar books did, although few as well-written as I knew mine would be.

Then I testdrove the idea past friends, including other writers. Every single one tried to discourage me. Repeatedly.

“Write about someone famous,” they said. “Pick a bigtime adventurer, not this nobody.”

“Sure, the guy sounds like a cool story,” they said. “But it doesn’t matter because you won’t be able to sell it.”

I listened to my friends just hard enough to argue them down. People would read this book because it would be so well-crafted, so polished, that it wouldn’t matter what it was about. They’d read it because it was good!

I tossed Susan Orlean’s very cool “The Orchid Thief” at them. That book was lovingly and expertly written — about a nobody. And Orlean’s nobody wasn’t even admirable in most of the ways we use that word, whereas Clancy was. “The Orchid Thief” had sold.

Then I hit them with “Into the Wild.” Jon Krakauer’s book was also an exploration of a guy who loved wilderness and strove for a close-to-the-bone lifestyle many would consider crazy, and who died as a result. Krakauer’s book got made into a mainstream movie. Maybe mine would too!

But the bottom line was this: All I cared about was writing a book I’d be proud of. I was fixated on the belief that that’s what I had. In this book I could teach people about wilderness values; give them a glimpse into a world I had loved and still pined for; and share with them a man who knew the value of simplicity and freedom.As much as I had once wanted to see my name in print, I wanted now to hold up a book I had written that did not make me uncomfortable.

What you already guessed but I, of course, completely missed is that a famous name, especially a well-earned one like Orlean or Krakauer, is a selling tool. Even if my writing skill was comparable (it wasn’t yet but I figured with typical confidence that I’d get close during the drafting process) I had no name, no ‘platform,’ as agents and publishers say.

How could I have missed a detail so obvious and important? First, as I have said, I learn slowly. Second, I’m a writer because I love language. Fondle and collect words. Taste and touch and smell sentences. Good writing trumps all in the slightly skewed universe of Jo. : D

In the real universe what happened was I spent several months researching my book, a year writing it, at least a year doing several deep revisions, between which it sat, composting. And at the time of this writing, July 2009, I have still not sold it to a publisher.

But back to 2002. Over the spring and summer of that year I conducted long interviews with Clancy’s family and friends. I rode on a floodstage whitewater river taking page after page of waterlogged notes with a man who had loved and tried to rescue Clancy on the day of his death, Jon Barker. I read and reread Clancy’s journals. Watched and rewatched Jon’s many videos of crazy rafting adventures. In other words I did the kind of methodical, deep research you do if you want to write a good nonfiction book.

Periodically friends again tried to talk me out of this project. By this time, as usual, I was infatuated with every person I had interviewed, with the ways their lives came together, the ways their stories supported and contradicted each other. I knew I could tell their stories well and I badly wanted to. Stories like that deserved to be told, I said to my friends.

I was so immersed that some nights I dreamed I sat in a raft with Clancy, the oar handles propped under his elbows, low sparks of humor in his eyes as we swapped stories. No way was I going to quit this book, even if my friends’ warnings were starting to sink in and I felt a familiar discomfort, a feeling I recognized from other half-baked plans about to go awry. Not the feeling of guilty pleasure  I had had writing the cougar book. This was the feeling of a person in the middle of nowhere who has realized the tank will run dry before she sees a gas station.

If you’ve been reading along with me you noticed an agent, R, who made a cameo appearance and then – poof! – disappeared from my narrative. Where did she go? The answer is, I don’t know and as far as I can tell, good riddance.

Websites, blogs and books get written about how to find an agent but few about how hard it can be to get rid of one you are not happy with.

My coauthor and I ended up hiring R as our agent because she was the only agent we contacted. She was the only agent we contacted because she was the only agent any of our friends knew. I think she was willing to sign us because we already had contracts on the table. An (admittedly small) paycheck was guaranteed. But that’s just a guess. I’ll never know.

The first time we spoke with R we concluded our phone conversation and each hung up our extension and I turned to my coauthor. “The woman is a shark,” I said.

I can’t recall why I said that. I don’t recall disliking her. All I am sure of today is that I felt pushed and manipulated, and that I would have bet a lot that I was not the first person who has concluded a conversation with R feeling that way.

“If you’re going to swim in shark-infested waters, don’t you want a shark of your own?” he countered.

When her contract arrived in the mail we quibbled about a few details, mostly on principle since neither of us had ever seen an agent contract before and had no idea what it should say. Then we signed. When she advised us to choose the regional publisher from among our three offers because he was promising the largest advance, we took her advice.

Several months later the cougar book was finished and publication was approaching. R had told us – or at least my records say she told us — that she would market film and anthology rights to our book for us. I began calling her to see how that effort was going. Repeatedly. I mean really. Repeatedly.

The first time I reached her she was lovely, answering breezily — from Greece, if I recall, but perhaps it was Italy — that she was thrilled with how the book had come out. It was a wonderful book. Just as soon as she got back from her travels she’d get started. We waited what seemed an appropriate amount of time for her to “get started,” then I began calling and emailing again. This time she emailed that she’d written a long answer to a shopping list of questions my coauthor and I had generated but it disappeared before she could send it. She’d get back to me when she had more time. Then I think she said her hard drive crashed. Then for several months, as far as I can tell from my records, no calls or emails were returned.

When she finally responded by email, R sounded as tired of my pestering as I had grown of her nonresponsiveness. She explained that she was our lawyer not our agent. It was not her job to promote our book in any way, including marketing the rights we had specifically removed from the publisher’s contract on her advice. She had simply read a contract for us and been paid to do so.

I wanted to believe that we had misunderstood one another. After all, my coauthor and I were both inexperienced authors. Maybe we’d heard what we wanted to hear instead of what she’d actually said. It was hard to imagine that she thought the $1500 she’d been paid (the standard agent’s 15% of a $10K advance) was an appropriate contract lawyer’s fee, but what did we know about media lawyers?  It was just as hard to believe that a lawyer in good standing with the California Bar, which she was, would lie in order to get a measly $1500.

We went back into our notes and contracts to try to understand what had happened. On careful reading the contracts were ambiguous. Our contract with R did in fact call her our lawyer; my notes from our conversations with her had been primarily about her agenting us; our contract with our publisher also called her our agent. Which was she?

I wrote to tell her we wanted to terminate the contract so that we could retain an agent. She wrote back that I’d better hire a lawyer.

Had our shark bitten us? It took a complaint to the California Bar before we got language removed from our publishing contract which had arranged for our royalties to be sent to R so that she could take 15% before sending the balance on to us.

Before I finished editing this post, I googled R and found out that, at least once upon a time, she did act as a media agent. She had clients who seemed very satisfied with her, according to at least one old magazine article I found. I tried to contact R via Facebook (the only contact I could find) to check my old notes with her. I received no response, which is a shame: I will probably never know if the problem was mismatched expectations, poor communication, or if Renee took a paycheck she never intended to fully earn.

And in the end it doesn’t matter. The lesson for me was that no writer is in full control of her fate. Every publishing house, every editor, every agent you sign a piece of paper with becomes a partner in the creation of a book that will ultimately bear your name, implicitly promising readers that you made the decisions, when that simply isn’t the case.

I know of no better reason for a person who hasn’t thought hard yet about why they are interested in traditional publishing to ponder that question long and hard.

Exasperated writers and publishers like to say, in this age where EVERYONE seems to be writing a book, that not all books deserve to be published. And that’s true.

I’d add though, that the vast majority of those who like to write do not need to subject themselves to the publishing industry. Just like a man who plays Stairway to Heaven on his guitar when he’s alone at night, a woman who sings Pavarotti in the shower,  people can write — and thanks to the internet, be easily read — without diving into waters full of moving shadows that might or might not be sharks.

Whether we were sharkbit or merely sloppy and naïve, we felt lightened by approximately one pound of flesh. Which is why, when I had three chapters and a detailed outline on “Anything Worth Doing” – you’ll recall that that’s the title of the rafting book this anti-blog is purportedly about — I went straight to publishers instead of seeking a new agent.

My coauthor on the first cougar book helped. We contacted some of the same editors we’d reached out to when shopping the cougar book, minus those who seemed a mismatch. Five calls each for a total of ten.

I have heard the truism that New York doesn’t accept unagented queries and that you should never cold-call a publishing house. All I know is that I have and the people on the other end of the phone have been polite every time, and helpful far more often than not. That goes double if they’ve talked with you before.

And why wouldn’t they be? Their business runs on writers. A writer calling a publisher is like a tree calling a timber company. The only hitch is that many people who want to be published are unable to deliver publishable work and in many cases aren’t even sure what publishable work looks like.

That doesn’t matter as much as you’d think: I believe editors believe they can spot those people at a glance. If they see potential for a marketable book in you, they will listen. Even if they don’t want your book, they will be friendly and polite: They might want the next.

Here’s another thing I believe with nothing but gut instinct to back it up: Editors are free agents. Just as publishing houses choose among books to produce, they choose among editors to employ. Editors need good writers to produce good books so their publishing houses will keep them. Or so a better house will steal them away.

I figure it like this: If I write one book in two years, sales of that book comprise my income, and response to it my reputation. If an editor spearheads publication of, say, ten books this year, those ten are to him what my one is to me. But a publisher like Harper Collins? They have a stable of imprints, and every imprint has a stable of editors who each have a stable of books, each of which is life itself to the writer. Any one writer or editor can fail dismally without a ripple to Harper Collins’ bottom line.

Point being, if you can write, editors WANT you to find them. And a no from an editor is not a wasted call if it suggests to that editor that you are a writer.

Speaking of which, for the purposes of this post, let’s define ‘writer’ as: A person who will deliver, on time and with minimal hassle, a marketable book that will not become the subject of litigation; that will make the editor feel good to have had a hand in it; that will support the editor’s reputation; and that seems likely to make the publisher money.

A writer will also promote said book to further increase the odds of profit, ideally while starting another marketable book.

When we were shopping the cougar book, half the publishers we called asked to see a query or proposal before the end of the call. Not this time. With “Anything Worth Doing,” only two did. After looking my proposal over, one said it looked like a great magazine article but not much of a book. The other complimented the writing but no thanks.

Clean sweep on the next batch, too.

I was pretty sure the problem wasn’t me. Which meant it was the book.

Meanwhile, against advice from the How-To folks and my friends, I plowed ahead and finished drafting “Anything Worth Doing.”

We’ve all heard about that Great Book that no publisher wanted but which, when someone finally saw its true value, instantly vaulted to the rarified air of the New York Times bestseller lists and stuck there, quivering, like a dart in cork.

I’m sure it happens. But usually when publishers don’t want books it’s because the books are bad. I believe a good book can be written on literally any subject. And so can a bad book.

After 20 rejections I had to suspect that I had written a bad book.

I decided not to call a third group of publishers. Instead I put the manuscript away. This wasn’t difficult: I was discouraged as hell. I worked on other projects, waiting for time to give me a more measured perspective.

Something like a year later, I returned to the manuscript. I tried to read it like a piece of furniture, a chair or a table. What was its job, and did it do that job? I asked.

I could easily see that ‘Anything Worth Doing’ was well-written in the sense that the word-level and sentence-level writing were strong and satisfying. But I knew that alone couldn’t make the book good. In other words, I was growing up as a writer. A book is made out of words but it needs to be far greater than their sum.

What I saw after resting the manuscript for a year was an obvious fatal flaw: The book was in love with its subject matter. And it forgot to invite the reader to fall in love as well. It presumed that the reader, like the writer, came to the book gaga over wilderness, whitewater, and quirky, independent lifestyles. The book didn’t justify itself. It didn’t even think it had to.

I tore the manuscript apart, rewrote it, polished it, then got in my car and went to visit two friends. One was an old high school buddy named Steve Mays. The other was a college classmate named Christine Hathwell. Neither are whitewater boaters or adventurers. Steve is a Seattle attorney and Christine a damn good shade tree poet who lives a quiet life in Boise, Idaho. Both are very thoughtful readers. Both agreed to read for me, which meant that we read the entire book aloud, picking it to bits yet again.

I also went to see my most important source, Jon Barker, one of the two participants in most of the crazy adventures that comprised the book. He couldn’t help much. Like I had been writing it, he was in love with the material.

Back home, I rewrote the book. Again. Then polished it. Again.

Then I called a regional publisher called Falcon. Rights to the cougar book had just reverted to me and my coauthor from Sasquatch. My coauthor had opted not to pursue reselling and revising that book. He had said I was welcome to it.

So I figured I’d pitch both projects to Falcon which:

1. was not in New York, source of all 20 of my rejections and

2. had published a travel book I’d helped write and

3. specialized in outdoor and natural history titles.

Good match, right?

I called Falcon with my two queries on the desk in front of me, in case I forgot what was so compelling about my books. But I didn’t need my cheat sheets. The editor, Erin Turner, was enthusiastic, and her enthusiasm made my own easy to express. She asked to see queries for both projects.

Within days (in my experience good news from publishing houses comes fast, bad news more slowly) she called to tell me she wanted to take both books to committee where a final decision would be made. She was nearly positive Falcon would offer to buy a revised cougar book. She was less sure of the rafting book, but she would push for it. She liked it. And Falcon wanted to add memoirs and nonfiction adventure narratives to its stable, so there was a good chance.

Her next call was one of those good news/bad news conversations. Falcon wanted the cougar book. The marketing folks had balked at Anything Worth Doing.

They wanted books of that type, Erin explained, but the key to their marketing strategy was that such books needed to generate their own media. The author or subject or the events had to be newsworthy. What I had done was write about events already gone stale with age; people nobody ever heard of; and rivers famous mostly inside the river-running community.

Please note that these are the same objections my friends and family leveled more than three years previous, before I typed word one of the outline.

I tried to believe that the book’s latest revision was still not good enough to pull the thing out of its assigned niche and into good mainstream storytelling, but I couldn’t. I was positive, despite almost zero encouragement from any sector that mattered, that I now had a really nice little book that a wide range of readers would enjoy, that I could promote and represent, that I should be able to publish.

I decided to set the manuscript aside yet again. Maybe after time passed I’d see it for a failure and be able to let it go. Maybe they’d all been right. Maybe I was a good writer with a crappy instinct for a marketable story.

That spring I gathered my remaining determination and dusted off Anything Worth Doing. I revised again but my changes were small. I had reached the point of diminishing returns. And the book WAS good. If it wasn’t, my interior voice was out of sync with reality.

What my interior voice was still unsure of was this: Was it marketable?

I would test that, I decided, by seeking an agent. Agents don’t take on projects they don’t think they can sell.

This time I went about finding an agent the same systematic way I have gone about finding publishers. I did my homework. My first criterium was that the agent be computer savvy. I looked for agents with an online presence who accepted email queries. It surprised me the number that didn’t.

If I found an agency with a smart website but I wouldn’t have been proud to have written at least one of its recently published books, it didn’t make my list. And if an agent didn’t say or imply that her interest in a writer went beyond selling an individual book, she didn’t make my list. I wanted a career partner.

In a week I had ten agents at ten different agencies to contact. I crafted a new query, polished my proposal in case one of them asked to see it, and off went the emails. While I waited for answers, I hunted up another ten agents. Which was good, because my first ten queries netted ten rejections. Out of the second ten, I got a yes.

Her name was Nancy Ellis. She was in California, but she flew to New York several times a year. She worked from a garden office in her yard. She liked dogs and parrots. How…human.

I wasn’t thrilled with the titles she’d been involved with. A lot of self-help. Not my thing. Many of her clients were professionals in a field first and writers about that field second. Not me. But she said she was all about helping writers plan their careers.  She said she liked to represent books which aimed, in some small way, to do good in the world or at least offer a hopeful vision. She said she loved my book. She thought she thought she could sell it quickly for a 20K advance. She knew who would want it.

I would have signed with Godzilla if he said all that.

I told her about Renee, and that I wanted her to keep me apprised of her efforts on my behalf. I wanted to see the rejection letters. She understood perfectly. It was a hassle to send them individually but she’d keep a file for me and mail them en masse if I wanted.

On September 12, 2007 I became a client of NELA which, among other benefits, gave me an answer to a question that has, since the first time I heard it, turned me into a stutterer: How is your book doing?

Answer:  My agent is working on it.

That was worth 15% (of nothing) right there.

Nancy was definitely not Renee. She wasn’t easy to reach by phone, but hers is a numbers game: many clients, few paychecks. If she chitchatted with every author she represents every week, she’d get no contracts negotiated.

What she reliably did was send out email bulletins when she was heading to New York. She’d ask for our revised proposals and manuscripts. She’d report afterward, also via email, what had happened on those trips.

And based on what she was hearing from publishers, those whose books she hadn’t sold received homework.

Once it was to develop what she called E-blast lists, exhaustive lists of people and businesses who could be alerted via email about a book’s release. E-blast lists are free, she said, unlike traditional mailings. Publishers loved them and loved authors with an eye to the bottom line and an aggressive, hands-on marketing plan.

Another time it was a test reader study. I sent selected chapters and a survey to 50 people, many of them strangers, and compiled the results.

She wanted competition analyses of books in our arena. That information was already in my proposal, but I expanded and revised it.

At Nancy’s request I also updated my bio, began learning about blogging, developed a website, and wrote a brief ‘catalogue’ description of my book and of myself.

I’d given up magazine and newspaper freelancing, my old standby source of income and validation. Nancy said that had been an error. At her direction I started writing short fiction so that I could ‘get my name out there’ as had been the case when I freelanced.

And I received emails like this one, dated March 2008:

Our catalog submissions proved very successful for certain kinds of non-fiction titles, while challenging for others.  Yours came under the “challenging” category, primarily because the market is overbought with current and new titles.  That said, I will still be presenting your work in person when I’m in New York (next week through mid-April), and be back to you after my return.  In the meantime, keep that bulldog faith.

At the end of that particular New York trip Nancy wrote to schedule a teleconference. She had said she planned to pare back her client list and by now she’d been working for me, without a paycheck, for eight months. She was going to drop me.

She didn’t. Instead she gave me more homework. And told me that, of her unpublished clients, she had decided to keep a handful and I was one. The reason, she said, is that I’m a hard worker and a professional. I’m pretty sure that meant that I did her homework assignments.

All told, by March of 2009 I had spent as much time on Nancy’s homework as I had on any one of the major revisions of my book. And both of us were still working for free. Go ahead: add up the hourly wage that was going to be mine if Nancy could come through with that $20K advance, less 15%. Dare you!

One day in March of 2009 I began thinking about the fact that, contrary to our verbal agreement, I had not seen a single rejection letter. How many editors had actually seen my work, I wondered. I liked Nancy but…where were those letters?

I did some online searching. Nancy Ellis, I learned, is listed on the watchdog site, Preditors and Editors, as not recommended. There seemed to be two reasons. One is that she had apparently been a member of a group called the IILAA, which was said to have used questionable methods to promote member agents. Some member agents were said to have charged fees for pre-publication services, a big no-no in the profession.

As far as I can tell, the group, whatever it did, is extinct.

There was also at least one lawsuit, more than a decade previous, in which a client sued Nancy for improperly withheld royalties. Threads mentioning the suit were vague and comprised mostly of hearsay. The internet is a funny place: for better or worse, once a track has been pressed into the soft mud of cyberspace, it never fades.

I was not concerned with those issues. Nancy had never charged me, not even for office expenses she was entitled to. And she couldn’t withhold royalty checks on an unsold book. What did concern me a bit were several threads on writers’ sites questioning whether, after Nancy accepted a client, she did any work for them if they were not her hottest prospects.

Where were those rejection letters?

After a phone conference in April of 2009 I released Nancy from our contract — not because of anything I’d read online;  she’d satisfied my doubts — but for two more compelling reasons. One was that I felt sorry for her. I no longer believed that the time she’d put into me was going to net her a paycheck.

The other reason was common sense.  Nancy wouldn’t have taken me on if she didn’t expect editors she worked with to fall in love with my book. But if she was a good businesswoman she talked to those people the first time she took my manuscript to New York. Since then she had been trolling and, I had to assume, wasting less and less of her time doing so. It was time for both of us to move on.

I had learned a lot from Nancy, not least that finding an agent who believes in your work feels a lot more like chemotherapy than cure. It’s when the work starts (again), not when you sit back and relax.

I learned a little more after we parted ways.

At our split, I asked a favor: could she please give me my rejection letters? They would be useful to me going forward, whether I decided to retain another agent or market the book on my own, is what I said. What I also thought was, then I’ll know if she really had, as I believed and half wanted not to believe, worked to sell my book.

I had no idea how or whether she’d respond. She did, though. She sent this:

I’ll get you your info by next Monday;  my computer crashed in May of  ’08 and all email/files were lost.  I know we don’t have any formal rejection letters, but I’ll reconstruct the rest from my notes.  As we discussed, the New York houses were the least responsive, both to pitches and menu listings.  Your best chances will be with small, niched and mid-range publishers.  Back to you on Monday.     All very best    N

Four days later I received a blow-by-blow list of houses she had directly pitched my book to, as well as those who had at least been presented with brief descriptions.

Along with the list came comments she’d received from her editor contacts. The project was ‘too small’ for New York; my first book’s audience was not related to the potential audience for the second book; the market was overcrowded with books like mine; I had no national ‘platform,’ no ‘substantial online presence.’

Nancy also offered advice to go forward with: consider midsize and regional publishers; consider self-publishing to show that I could garner readers; consider coming to Book Expo, a huge event publishers from all over the world attend. And good luck.

Did Nancy do a good job for me? You be the judge. One thing I know for sure is that whatever I got, I got for free.

I let two months pass before I gathered my resolve and resumed seeking a publisher for Anything Worth Doing. I started as small as I possibly could: I called a tiny publisher named Backeddy Books, based in Cambridge (that’s Idaho, not Massachussetts.) Nobody answered. Nobody replied to my message. I didn’t call back. The exercise had served its purpose: I was ready to go to work.

On principle I emailed Stackpole, a midsize regional which publishes outdoor titles and which, I had been told, was New York Times bestselling author Ted Kerasote’s first publisher. Ted writes smart, original books on outdoor themes.

Then I combed my proposal yet again.

Then finally I did what I’d known I would all along: I called Colorado-based Johnsonbooks. You might remember that Johnsonbooks offered on the original cougar book. A larger publisher would have been a smarter financial bet, but this small regional publisher of books I respected was where I’d always intended to go if I couldn’t land a New York house.

It turned out that publisher Mira Perrizo not only remembered me, she remembered wanting to publish the cougar book. She remembered seeing that book when it came out. She remembered thinking Johnsonbooks would have done it better.

Yes, send the query.

Yahoo! I emailed it.

That same afternoon she replied. Send the proposal.

The next day she replied again. If I didn’t mind a very small advance, possibly no advance at all, send the manuscript.

I told Mira I didn’t care about money with this project anymore. I cared about publishing a good book. Would she help me do that? Yes, she said. I could count on that.

Silence. It was a happy silence for me: I had regretted not choosing Johnsonbooks for the cougar book. The house’s authors included firebrand Edward Abbey, well-known natural history writer David Quammen, and Harley Shaw, author of the most compassionate, honest cougar book I’ve ever read. I was positive Mira was going to offer on my book, and that together we’d publish a book I could promote with pride.

Three weeks passed. I emailed: Had she read the manuscript? No, she wrote back. But feel free to pester her. I shoved aside my own truism about good news from editors coming fast and bad news slow, chose not to move ahead and submit elsewhere, and waited.

Three more weeks. I emailed again. Had she read the manuscript? Yes, she said. And she liked it. But.

But. Johnsonbooks would pass.

What the hell?

Mira Perrizo of Johnsonbooks and I had two conversations after she rejected my book. Both were educational. I was grateful for her time. I’ll share some of what I learned here and then, at least for the time being, this long anti-blog essay will be complete.

In our first conversation, Mira said that the primary reason she was rejecting me was that she had published books by or about rafters from two other authors in the past couple years. Both were far better known in the whitewater community than I am. She had expected the books to do well. They had not. Perhaps, she said, the rafting community is not a book buying group. Or Johnsonbooks doesn’t know how to sell to that group.

Besides, she said, these are strange times. She’d published general interest books recently, positive they would sell well, and they hadn’t. Author events and signings which once would have netted a dozen or more sales might sell no copies at all.

Listening, I thought about how often recently, in these days of spiraling costs, I have opted to buy a used book instead of a new one, even though I know this is equivalent to stiffing a waitress. I’m choosing not to pay the writer for her work or the publisher for betting on the writer.

Yes, I said to Mira. Strange times.

I tried to argue that mine is not a rafting book any more than Jon Krakauer’s ‘Into the Wild’ was a survivalist book. She said it takes money to drum up the kind of broad attention Krakauer’s book got. New York publishers have that kind of money. Johnsonbooks does not. She needs authors or topical interest or free publicity to sell books.

I asked Mira how many copies my book would have had to sell at Johnsonbooks to reward their investment. Her answer: Three thousand and the house breaks even. Ten thousand over three years makes money.

She should change her mind about my book, I told her. I could generate 3,000 in sales. She wouldn’t lose money on me. Mmhm, she said. Other writers had told her that too.