The Journey of a Book: It Starts With a Non-Fiction Book Proposal
#1 from the Journey of a Book Series. Why I'm trying for a traditional book deal via a literary agent with my book proposal, what it's called and the hook of my book.
Someone online said to me recently (and, I’m paraphrasing) “why are you concerned about showing up on Instagram? Why don’t you just, you know, write?”
And I have to say I was a little taken aback. Because not only had I been writing. I’d been writing bloody hard. And I was very close to finishing it and sending it out to literary agents.
I felt unseen. Misunderstood.
And a couple of things occurred to me:
for someone who professes (whether to myself or out loud) to want to share my writing journey, I’m not actually talking about it or sharing it very much.
creatives often worry about ‘over-selling’ on social media. For example, if they have a newsletter they mention it once and think that’s enough. Or feel ‘salesy’ for saying it more than once. But followers are not as invested in your stories and posts as you think. You have to keep repeating your message.
I will be brutally honest with you. There have been times over the years, in fact, for many months and years at a time, when I have spent too long fannying about on Instagram. When I was procrastinating by creating flat lays of my chickens’ eggs, or the ingredients that went into a cookie were strewn about on my favourite brown table (that I’d bought and sanded down, especially for my Instagram flat lays!) I have spent more time not writing than writing. So you could forgive this person who’d messaged me because, after all, that was my thing.
But in the past couple of years, I’ve turned my creative life around. Alongside creating my mentoring membership, The Confident Creative Club, becoming a digital writer on Medium, and creating this Substack and podcast (all of which take lots of creative energy to fight off imposter syndrome and fear) I’ve written a workbook called Journaling Your Goals (which is now on the to-do list to be updated) and I’ve just finished writing a 30,000+ word non-fiction book proposal. This is just waiting for the third and final edit before I start sending it out to literary agents.
Yes, the writing projects ALWAYS take longer than I anticipate they’ll take. Primarily because I’m still fighting with my lack of self-belief and the thoughts that appear every time I open the document such as ‘who on earth would want to read a book by me?’ and ‘why on earth do I feel I have something to say - who do I think I am'?’ and so on. But I’m getting there in tiny steps. Bit by bit, day by day.
And sometimes, or oftentimes, I build my confidence in other ways - such as writing on Medium and holding Masterclasses via Zoom - in order to give me the confidence to write my book. I look at my writing, not as a separate and solitary act, but as part of my business and mindset as a whole and this helps me incredibly so.
All of which is a long-winded introduction to the first in my series of writings about my writing and publishing journey.
I want to record the process for two reasons.
For sentimental reasons. If (or when) I become published I want to be able to look back, honestly, and see how long it took me, that it didn’t happen as an ‘overnight success’ and what was involved.
I love hearing about the processes behind what a writer is producing. Absolutely love it. This love is why I’ve shown a lot of my desk on Instagram over the years as well as documenting what I’m writing in photographs and sharing time-lapses of my planning and writing processes.
I’m actually a big fan of Austin Kleon’s ’Show Your Work’ and I found I was naturally doing this before I read his book. But, I found this documentation I was doing - the filming and uploading, whilst pleasing to do, disrupted my actual writing. It destroyed my flow and focus and I found it would take me days and weeks to write a simple two or three-thousand-word essay as I couldn’t get to grips with what I was trying to say. I was also struggling with what I was trying to do with my writing. I didn’t know what my purpose was, I was drifting from project to project and never finishing. I was getting nowhere and something had to give.