Out of little acorns.....

Weeks passed without a word from the publishers, How To Books.

I left it until early December 2006 and decided they may not have received it – cyberspace is a delicate flower sometimes and ‘bounces back’ and systems go down often occur (I should have been in IT!) and emailed to ask them whether there was any news.

Wow, next day a response, apologising for the delay and explaining how busy things were and that they would give it full attention very soon. You forget when something is so important to you that other people have busy lives and life does not just revolve around you. I was just pleased that it hadn’t been laughed out of court!

But then January passed and so did most of February – this couldn’t be right. So with fear of rejection, I rang and asked politely whether I should be looking elsewhere for a publisher. I was pleased to hear (well sort of) that the revolution known as cyberspace had once again let us down – we all know that if you open an email and promise yourself you will deal with it later, there is every chance that you may unwittingly forget, as more letters, emails, requests, faxes, post it notes etc. land on your desk. And this is what happened to my proposal – I was promised attention and they would get back to me in the next week.

In fact I got an email that night saying they would be keen to hear more and would want a detailed proposal of chapters and a sample chapter – now I WAS excited.

I worked furiously on the detailed proposal of chapters and showed a good friend of mine, Steve, what I had put together, he tweaked and adjusted it (and in fairness made it look a lot better) and I sent it to How To Books with the promise that I would get a chapter to them in the next two to three weeks; as an author needs time to create their masterpiece!

I emailed them at 10am on 15th March, hoping I’d get a ‘thanks and looking forward to seeing the sample chapter’.

This time my guarded optimism was unfounded – at 10.18am on 15th March I was offered a book contract, stating ‘It’s great’ and no need for a sample chapter. Then a barrage of questions I hadn’t even thought about – what’s the word count, delivery date and what did I think of ‘The Consumer`s Guide to Negotiation How to negotiate great deals in your personal life and save a ton of money’ as a title?

OH MY WORD!!

I was in a library and I got up and punched the air – what a fool! Still I was ecstatic and words don’t aptly describe the feeling. The thought I would soon become an author, recognised (hopefully) as an expert in the field – it seemed to me that the book, even in my own mind, helped me feel that I knew what I was talking about and somebody else wanted to hear more. This cloud 9 feeling lasted hours and then reality set in….

Mmm word count, delivery date, 50,000 words – how do I do that? Where do I start? This had been an idea, a thought out idea, but I didn’t want to raise my hopes at an early stage, so hadn’t really concerned myself with the smaller detail.

I decided that I would write the first sentence and see how it went!!