Sell Your Nonfiction Book

Telling a nonfiction story with fiction techniques

The Tyee has published my review of John Vaillant's book The Tiger: How John Vaillant Caught a Tiger by the Tale. Excerpt:

John Vaillant bowled me over with The Tiger. His book casts light on an urgent but little-known environmental issue on the other side of the Pacific. But his book is also a master class in using the techniques of fiction to tell a nonfiction story. 

When a novelist pitches a story idea to an editor, the editor's first question is, "What's at stake?" In this case, it might seem hard to establish the importance of the events Vaillant describes. They take place in the Primorye Krai ("Maritime Province"), an obscure corner of the Russian Far East, roughly at the latitude of Seattle and Vancouver. Despite its brutal winters, it supports a complex ecosystem something like that of the B.C. coast: fish, forests, big predators, and hungry humans. 

The Primorye and B.C. have other parallels: Just as we provide China with an illegal supply of bear paws and gall bladders, the poachers of the Primorye make big money killing tigers to supply the Chinese market. 

So we can identify with what's at stake for those poachers; a lot of North Americans break the law to pay the rent. 

Writers have a saying about their business: "You can't make a living, but you can make a killing." Poachers would agree completely.

Doing a workshop on nonfiction writing

From Friday, May 28 to Sunday, May 30, I'll be at a conference in Salmon Arm, BC sponsored by the Shuswap Association of Writers. I'll talk on Sunday morning about using online resources to write nonfiction.

Pitching a publisher (updated)

I had the pleasure of coffee with a Vancouver publisher yesterday, where we discussed three possible books: two nonfiction and one fiction. 

The original idea I'd proposed, a family memoir by my two brothers and me, didn't go over well on the basis of a sample chapter. But I said I'd revise in the light of his comments and get back to him.

The other nonfiction idea was a collection of my BC-related articles for The Tyee, which I've been writing for since 2003. He looked over my proposal and thought it might have possibilities. Again I said I'd give him more to consider. I estimated that the book might have 45,000 words plus another 15,000 of commentary

As for the novel, I gave him a quick plot summary and the first 30 pages of Henderson's Tenants, on which I've been working, off and on, for years. The publisher said he'd get back to me early in the new year.

So I came home and started putting together the Tyee anthology. Somewhat to my surprise, I found that in a few hours I'd put together articles totalling 50,000 words, with more still to add. This is why I'm a big proponent of writing articles on your nonfiction subject: You're making money (or at least a reputation) from them, and creating material for the eventual book as well.

Update (April 9): It took a few months, but the other day I finally heard from the publisher; the answers were all no. 

This doesn't much discourage me. I'll pitch a few more publishers, but I'll also start exploring the possibility of publishing my own work in e-book format. 

Here's the book!

 
 Sell Your Nonfiction Book has been out for a few days now. The link will take you to the Canadian purchasers' page, where you can switch to US if you need to. I'll put proper links to each page in a week or two. 

Page proofs and a title change

I've been proofreading the typeset pages, and it's going well--most of the corrections are very minor. The proofs will go back on Monday or Tuesday at the latest. If all goes well, the book will be out late this month or early in September. 

The publisher has changed the title to Sell Your Nonfiction Book, which is fine with me. I've changed the title of this blog accordingly.

Oh heck, I'll just publish it myself

Via the Globe and Mail: Oh heck, I'll just publish it myself. Excerpt: 

The biggest surprise Saskatchewan author Mary-Ann Kirkby got over the seven years it took her to produce I Am Hutterite, an intimate portrait of a little-known, secretive Prairie culture, was that no publisher wanted it. 

“No one has ever told our story,” says Kirkby, who grew up in the Fairholme Hutterite Colony in southern Manitoba, and later became a television reporter in Prince Albert, Sask. 

“The Hutterites have been so private. And here I am an insider who speaks the language and knows the culture very well. I just thought it was a no-brainer.” 

In fact it was – but not the one she had imagined. Like so many aspirants before her, Kirkby says she was “devastated” by the unilateral response to her book from Canadian publishers. 

“I approached all the majors in Toronto,” she says. “I have all the rejection letters.” 

But she also had sufficient faith to continue, and ultimately published the book herself under an imprint she called Polka Dot Press. Today, Kirkby's trove of rejections should cause considerable embarrassment among the literati south of Bloor Street. 

Using a $35,000 line of credit to print the first 5,000 copies of I Am Hutterite two years ago, she has since sold more than 50,000. In its first year, hers was the fourth-bestselling title in the Saskatoon store of bookseller McNally Robinson, and won the prize for non-fiction at the Saskatchewan Book Awards. 

Today, major retailers are ordering copies by the pallet-load; Kirkby is negotiating the sale of worldwide rights for a new edition with a U.S. publisher.

I'm delighted for Ms. Kirkby, but I wouldn't counsel such a venture for everyone. Nor would I scorn the publishers who turned her down.

Betting $35,000 on the success of a book is absurdly risky; the story is in the paper because she won her bet, while any number of entrepreneurs, in more fields than writing, lose such sums and are never heard from again.

And thank heaven publishers make mistakes about what the market wants. If they knew exactly what would succeed, they wouldn't publish anything except sure-fire bestsellers. In that case, hundreds of Hutterites would be breaking into print, and everyone else would be thinking about self-publishing.

An update on the book

I got the manuscript in on June 14, and my editor sent it back with annotations and question. Those have now been dealt with, and the revised manuscript has gone back in. 

We still have more work, of course: checking the page proofs, putting together a package of online resources that will be available here, and so on. But the main task is done, and the book's publication date is September 1. I'm pretty pleased with it.

Making some progress

The last few weeks have been busy—trying to cover the H1N1 outbreak, and reporting on the provincial election for The Tyee. Still, the nonfiction book is moving ahead pretty well.

I've done much of the material on creating a blog as a workspace, and incorporated some rough material on effective style and organization. 

The book's going well

I'm into the second major section of a four-section book: Planning is done, and Researching is nearly done. This section is devoted largely to using online resources (mostly Google) as quickly and efficiently as possible. And it is extraordinary how helpful Google can be if you know what it offers.

When Researching is done, I'll go into Writing and Marketing—some of which is already in place, though it will need revision and expansion. So the June 14 deadline looks very doable.

The book proposal

Here's the proposal I wrote for this book: 

Download Proposal 

...but don't take it as an automatic model. After a very happy ten-year relationship with Self-Counsel Press, I don't have to spell out everything when I pitch a book idea. In fact, I plan to expand on this proposal in the next few days so I'll have a better outline for the book.

If you're thinking about interesting a publisher before you start writing, or when you're in the early stages of the book, visit the Authors' Page for Pearson Education. Even if you're not planning a textbook, it will give you a range of guidelines for different publishers. Before you send a proposal to the two or three most likely publishers of your book, organizing it along the lines of a Pearson pitch will help you understand your own project in more detail. You'll understand what publishers are looking for, and you'll be able to adapt your concept to their needs...making your book more likely to be published.

So a book proposal really has two readers: the publisher, and the author.