A Single Letter Makes A Difference

Do you ever get stuck on a project where it seems to drag on and never get handled?

Yes it happens to me. As an acquisitions editor at Morgan James Publishing. The bulk of my day is involved answering emails and spending time on the phone with authors about their book projects. I'm working with many different types of authors at different stages in the process for their books. It's a lot of fun and interesting work on a wide variety of types of books for different audiences. If you want to know more detail, I encourage you to hear my recent radio interview where I spoke about the details.

In the middle of my acquisitions work, I have my own book projects and on-going effort to tell people about Jumpstart Your Publishing Dreams. Originally I released this book several years ago and published it through my small press, WTW Press. 

While I have continued to promote my book and teach on the topic, the actual book needed updating in several areas:

—first, I changed companies and moved from Arizona almost two years ago. The Arizona information in the book was outdated.

—several of the resources in the book needed to be changed. Some websites that I wrote about years ago aren't functioning any longer. Change is a constant part of the publishing world.

—Morgan James offered to publish the book and get it out to a broader audience and in many different formats including all of the various types of Ebooks and an audio version of the book. Morgan James is selling their books into 98% of the bookstores in North America including the brick and mortar bookstores.

About a year ago, I signed a contract with Morgan James for this revision. It was exciting. My challenge was finding the time to make the necessary corrections. This sort of time crunch is what almost every writer faces. I went through one round of changes with the designer last March. Yes, it was almost a year ago. I printed my book and carried it to many different places around the country—but never got it handled—until the final portion of December.

Why did I find time during the holidays? Morgan James shuts their offices the last two weeks of the year. While I did answer some email during that time, my correspondence dwindled so I could focus on some other things—like my own writing.

I carefully read through each page of Jumpstart Your Publishing Dreams. Imagine my horror when I reached page 237 and this section, “Most people outside of the publishing community assume they will make money writing books, but the publishing numbers present a different story. Less than 90 percent of nonfiction books ever earn back their advance.”

OK, bear with me for a minute because the last sentence of that paragraph did not say what I wanted it to say. What the revised version says is “More than 90 percent of nonfiction books never earn back their advance.” Yes that is the reality that only 10% of nonfiction books earn their advance.

This change was just one of a number of important changes that happened in the revision process. Also the pagination for the book changed so the index for the book was completely overhauled in this updated version.

I'm excited about the information in this book and how it is helping writers. I continue to promote the material and speak on it. This coming week I will be teaching a Jumpstart Your Publishing Dreams workshop at the San Francisco Writers Conference. Also next month (March 21^st and 22^nd) I will be in Spokane, Washington teaching at the Inland Northwest Christian Writers Conference. I hope to see you at one of these events. I'm working on more speaking events later this year and you can always see my speaking schedule at this location.

And if you can't get to a writers' conference where we connect in person, then I encourage you to pick up a copy of Jumpstart Your Publishing Dreams and begin to study it and apply it to your writing life.