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Friday, December 3, 2010

Got Some Good News and Some Bad News

I've some good news and some bad news.

The good news is…

No, a publisher hasn’t picked us up yet.

No, Ellen hasn’t called yet… nor has her mother, Betty — not yet.

No, Gayle hasn’t called yet.

Kelly Ripa and Oprah haven’t called either — but it’s too soon for them to call.  We just emailed them a couple of weeks ago.

The good news is that we’ve finished writing the first draft of the children’s book — and it’s stellar stuff… in our humble opinion.

Of course, a children’s book needs illustrations, and we’ve conceptualized what we want those to be.  Each picture will tell its own story, while propelling the story further — not just retelling a particular scene in the book.  Each scene will be able to stand on its own as it acts as a bridge to the next chapter.  Really, really cool stuff… in my humble opinion.

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The bad news is:

With the creative part of the book done, we have to jump into all the stuff I’ve learned to hate, Hate, HATE doing.  Because this book is such a departure from the other two, we have to start from scratch — start all over again.  A brand new book proposal has to be written; a new market research has to be done, new promotional ideas have to be generated; a completely different market has to be defined; research on the competition in the children’s book market has to be conducted, etc. 

Because this book is children fiction and not adult nonfiction, there’s a different way of addressing the publishers.  Publishers of children’s books are looking for completely different things.

I’ve got to start searching and creating new lists of publishers interested in children’s books.  I can’t use the ones I already have.  I have to start researching and contacting all new publishers…

By adding illustrations, we need to find and work with an illustrator who can meet our vision and expectations for the book… which is no easy task!  Hopefully, the publisher that picks us up will have the perfect illustrator for our book.

Ugh, Ugh, Ugh!!!  I am not looking forward to any of this!!! 

I know that we must do what we must do… but not just yet.

I’m not ready to start that phase, again... not just yet.

I’d still like to focus on the creative side of things for a bit longer.

The Ready or Not book is not ready yet, so I’d like to refocus on getting that completed, especially if we’re still planning to have that as our next book for the book club discussion that starts in January.   Once that book is finished, we’ll have three completed manuscripts to offer anyone who is interested in reading them.

We can start test marketing the children’s book.  Our first guinea pig will be Katherine’s 9-year-old son (soon to be 10) — and, I’m afraid, he’ll be the toughest critic we’ll face on this journey. 

My dream is that he will get so excited with the story that he’ll want to help us write the next one in the series.  I think that would be fabulous!  If the story can get him interested and excited about writing… WOW!

After him — if the book and we survive that test — we’ll ask other parents and kids to read it and give us their feedback.

After that… 

No, I’m not ready to think any further than that.  Let me stay in my happy place… just a bit longer.





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