Book Update (9 May 2022)

I’m Now Working with a Publisher on an Actual Book

After almost one and a half years after setting out to write a book, and about 1 year since setting it aside, I’m seeing some fruit. The book I thought I was going to write ended up becoming a class, and in the meantime, I had some time to think about what else I might want to write about. It is symbolically interesting that within a week or so of launching my class I was invited to pitch a book to a well-known publisher.

It is one year since I landed on what I believed was the first outline for my book, which was supposed to be about process. That “book” ended up becoming the Skillshare class I launched las month, The 6 Stages of Illustration: Leading Clients Through Your Art. I kept getting stuck in the gap between having an idea for a book and having the actual book. Because I know how to create a class, redefining the end-goal for this particular effort helped me just move forward and do something with it.

Around the time of the launch, I received an email from a publisher, who invited me to submit a book proposal. It no longer seemed necessary nor interesting to me to turn the 6 Stages class into a book, and I didn’t think that this was what they were looking for.

At this time I can’t say exactly who the publisher is nor what the book idea is, but I can say that it won’t be what I thought it would be when I started writing toward a book here in early 2021. I had originally thought the book would be more strategic, and even a bit philosophical. But it is morphing into something more hands-on and how-to, almost more like a workbook.

I am grateful for being able to work with a publisher on my proposal, which includes the overall idea and outline. The book is not a sure thing, but the publisher does “support me as an author”, and seems more or less interested in working with me. Whether or not this particular opportunity materializes, I am learning a lot about the process of writing a book and gaining deep insights into how publishers…