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From Blank Page to Book Deal
The story of my latest book, “KIN”
For the fourth time in my life, I have finished a book! And in November, it will be on shelves. (Pre-order it now! Go ahead! You know you want to.)
As I’m completing the final steps of the insular “drafting and selling and writing” stage, I’m interested in demystifying the process of going from “I have an idea” to “I am holding my own book.” There are lots of essays and tutorials about this, but I have never found them superfluous, because everyone’s unique experience adds to the collective imagination of how a book might come to exist.
My favorite story I heard on an episode of ologies, and is from this woman named Anne Copeland who wrote a book called Pumpkin, Pumpkin. The author says that she wrote a first edition of the book in 1986 and sent off query letters to publishers; then she started keeping a chart of the publishing house’s responses. She was rejected six hundred times before she sold her book. And now it’s in its third printing! (And I own a copy, and it’s great. Truly. Buy Pumpkin, Pumpkin.)
Why A Book?
KIN is my fourth-ish book. (My second one, Love Without Sex: Stories on the Spectrum of Modern Relationships, was an Audible original and wasn’t released in a paper volume. But boy, was it ever a book-amount of…
