Do I Meet Any of the 14? Judge for Yourself This Fall...

Having reached the halfway point of a 500-page biography I have to review for Tuesday morning, I decided to take a mental break by checking out the recently arrived 78 Reasons Why Your Book May Never Be Published & 14 Reasons Why It Just Might, by MacAdam/Cage editor Pat Walsh. The material covered by the first half of the title was pretty helpful; even though I will see my book coming out soon, I'm still learning a lot about what happens between the writing and the publication, and Walsh offers very straightforward explanations about how publishers decide to buy books and how agents decide to represent authors--not to mention why most manuscripts get rejected.

But it's the 14 reasons that will remain with me for every book I write after this. In fact, I'm thinking of phrasing them as questions, printing those questions out as a list, and then posting it in front of my desk as mental checkpoints. (Then again, as long as I'm writing at the far end of the living room, Mrs. Beatrice may veto putting up any sort of bulletin board near my work space, so I may have to avail myself of the Macintosh "Stickies" software...)