Dear Sir or Madam, Will You Read My Book?

I’m in that Twilight Zone period that all writers face. It’s that void, that black hole where you seem lost, disoriented. You’re not sure what you should do. If you do have an idea about what you should do, you’re not sure where to begin.

That’s right, I’m between projects.

If you are a writer, you’ll know what I’m talking about. I currently have proposals for a few new books sitting on the desks of acquisition editors around the country. You put in long, hard hours on the proposals, putting down on paper (or Word Doc) in great detail the concept behind the book, who the book will appeal to, the marketing plan for the book with solid examples of what you will do to help make it a New York Times bestseller, write a long and lengthy annotated table of contents (which basically outlines the entire book), and then produce at least three sample chapters.

And then you wait.

A response could take anywhere from 2-weeks to 6-months. But here’s the rub: you may NEVER receive a response. Either because they don't like it or they just never read it. So you would think, well, I’ll send the manuscript to multiple publishers. Oh, no. You can’t do that. The publishers you send them to have a strict rule – “no simultaneous submissions”.  What that means is, “You sent the proposal to us, now don’t send it to anyone else until we reply”.

But what if they never reply?

And that’s where I get thrown off the rails. I know the books are rock solid and will do well. Trust me, that’s not conceit. You have to feel that way or why are you writing the book and submitting a proposal in the first place? You want to keep pushing the manuscript to exhaustion before moving on to something else but you know that there is, more often than not, that chance of never hearing from the publisher again for whatever reason. So you feel like you've wasted your time sending the proposal to only one publisher and not hearing anything in 6-months...but you couldn't send it anywhere else. Ugh.

And that’s where I am. I have three proposals out there, manuscripts that I have always wanted to write, that I finally did write, and now they are out there helplessly waiting for the go ahead, or the snub. When you put that much work into something it can be hard to pry yourself out of the hole where all you want to do is just keep pushing the manuscripts out there and do more to give them a fighting chance. But you know that there isn’t much you can do for them except wait, change gears, and get yourself motivated to start on other projects that you have always wanted to do.

But those other proposals…..