Writing our adventure memoir has been quite the journey, and a different journey than Guy and I expected when we first decided to write A Dog’s Devotion together. Now that we are approaching the final phases of actually publishing and marketing our book, doing an “after action review” (borrowing a phrase we use in search and rescue as we debrief on missions after the fact) has shown us that there is a huge chasm between what we expected when we first set out on this trek several years ago and the reality we have been facing to date. This chasm stands out very clearly in a few areas highlighted below.

Writing the Book

• Expectation. As professionals with long careers demanding effective writing skills we figured we knew what we needed to author a book. After all we had both also published multiple articles in professional magazines! Little did we know….
• Reality. We quickly found out that technical writing is a very different beast than writing an adventure memoir. Let me just say that we did many, many drafts. Not the least of which was after we found a top notch New York agent  who insisted we do a total re-write using one voice (mine) instead of the two (Guy’s and mine) we started out with. That one was hard to swallow, but now in hindsight makes sense. That re-write took over four months and was followed by another 8 months of editing.

Developing writing skills for a memoir has been a steep learning curve. We now understand the importance of having a compelling storyline, knowing how to build suspense and use effective dialogue to drive characters and action. In many conversations with my friend Susan Purvis (author of best-seller Go Find) I also learned about the importance of letting ourselves be authentic and vulnerable, and letting our readers actually experience the story rather than just telling it (yes, our first draft was 100% narrative and it took us quite a while to master the art of writing dialogue that is not too stilted). Did we achieve perfection? Not even close, but we improved the manuscript dramatically over the course of several years of writing and re-writing. Looking back at some of our initial drafts now makes me cringe

Finding an Agent

• Expectation. Finding a good agent is close to impossible. You may send out hundreds of queries and manuscripts with no luck. You may never find an agent willing to take you on.
• Reality. By attending the Washington State Writers Conference in 2019 I was thrown into the world of making pitches to agents. To our surprise my pitches to six agents – you get three minutes to sell yourself and your manuscript in a face-to-face meeting – resulted in all but one requesting to see a partial or full manuscript. Regina Ryan, a seasoned and successful New York based agent with Regina Ryan Books was one of them and subsequently ended up taking us on as clients, but not without our promise to make substantial changes and a whole year of sending edits back and forth.
  We never did have to go through the painful process of sending out hundreds of queries just to get a steady stream of rejection letters.  With Regina we ended up having to learn about agent contracts and details of the relationship between authors, agents and publishers. With her firm guidance  and prior career as an editor, she has been an incredible asset for us. The process has been both rewarding and painful and importantly resulted in a vastly improved manuscript. But wait, writing the book was only the start…..

Business Proposal

• Expectation. Yes, we had heard that writing a business proposal goes hand in hand with writing a book. Our initial mindset was that we could probably crank out a proposal in a week or two.
• Reality. From Regina we found out that without a solid and comprehensively researched business proposal the idea of having a publisher take us on was pure fantasy. We ended up researching demographics, targeting primary and secondary audiences, describing our platform and strategies for reaching out to the right market segments, identifying influencers and podcasters on social media, doing comparisons with similar books with proven track records, demonstrating a credible social media platform, as well as a well designed book web site. It took months not weeks to get our business proposal to the point where it met with Regina’s approval.

And all of this is just the beginning. In the publishing industry they say that the actual writing of a book and putting together a business proposal only constitutes about 50% of the work required to get to successful publication. Guy and I are now entering the second and third phases, getting a publisher and launching a marketing campaign. We are initially pursuing a traditional publishing route and are finding out that this is a world that moves very slowly, perhaps even in an exacerbated way due to the impact of Covid on the industry at large.  We have not ruled out the idea of exploring a non-traditional route: self-publishing and hybrid approaches to publishing have become much more mainstream in recent years. We are grateful to have Regina by our side and the many others who have contributed to our journey so far, not the least our Beta readers, Evy Dudey who did an amazing job proof reading and helping us develop a style guide and my EPIC writers critique group. Stay tuned for an update in future posts. Time will tell where we end up.