w00t! This afternoon I finally got around to producing a halfway decent draft of a proposal for the Boob Book — the one on making informed decisions when you get a breast cancer diagnosis. And I’ve found a few people to send it to.

First effort was disappointing. The thing has been floating around inside my head for so long, I figured I could just toss it off and be done with it.

Well. No.

Scribbled a thousand-word cover letter. Yes, it covered all the bases. Yes, it distinguished my book from others. Yes, it described the (copious!) market. Yes, it was b-o-o-o-o-o-o-r-i-i-n-g!

It was a thousand-word plod around the bases.

Verbose, to begin with. Maybe if I cut out the overgrowth…

…Shorter, but no less plodding.

Would I buy a book on the basis of this proposal? Could I sell it to my marketing department? Could I sell it to anyone?

Hell, no!

So, I set it aside and went online in search of that old standby, Literary Marketplace.

You can buy a week’s worth of access to LMP for $25. So I ponied up the credit card and bought a username and password.

Disappointing.

The online LMP is not the LMP of yore. Back in the day, when you went to the library and hauled the several-volume work off the reference shelf, LMP was elaborately cross-indexed. And that was what made it a valuable work for would-be book authors. You could search a subject index that would take you to every publisher with anything in its backlist relevant to your keywords. You could search publishers by the various types of books the published — textbooks, for example, or inspirational, or genre works. You could search by just about anything.

Better yet, when you found a promising publisher, you also found a list of the key personnel, including acquisitions editors. You found their names, their titles, their snail-mail addresses, their phone numbers, and their e-mail addresses.

No more! The online LMP does not list any publishing company staff. Leastwise, not that I could find.

So, it looked like I would have to find a new literary agent to replace the deceased.

{sigh} For nonfiction? Ugh. Another layer of gatekeepers to cope with.

LMP‘s literary agency listings are slightly more forthcoming. But just slightly.

I trudged through 14 single-spaced pages of linked listings. Whenever I saw an agency’s name that i recognized (or thought I did), I clicked through to its information. Discarded the ones that weren’t in New York City or Boston.

This process yielded eight candidates.

One agency’s owner, I found on further exploration, croaked over last March. So that left me with seven possibilities.

However. When you try to copy and paste from LMP into a Word file so you can store it to disk, the data is jiggered so it won’t paste into Word!

Well. Some of it won’t. The agency names NEVER paste. Sometimes the agency address will paste into Word; often it won’t. Usually the names and email addresses of specific agents will paste over; sometimes they won’t.

So I had to sit there and type what I needed, character by character, shifting back & forth between Firefox and Word.

Infuriating! For this I paid these clowns 25 bucks?

Oh well. I learned something anyway: When you want to use LMP, go to the library.

That little project done, I returned to the proposal.

By now it had dawned on me that the introduction is full of the kind of lively language needed to write a proposal that looked like it was written by someone other than a zombie.

So: open that file, shoof around, fiddle around, adjust, rework, dork… A-n-n-d at the end of all that come up with…

A Pretty Darned Good Proposal!

By golly, it’s starting to look very good. The first paragraph is a real grabber. The next several grafs engage the attention, and one points out the size of the proposed book’s market.

All right!

Set it aside until next Tuesday, when I’ll send it off to the first agent on my list of choice.

Never email on a Monday. Your message will get lost in the tonnage of incoming that floods an agent or AE’s in-box over the weekend. Wait until the person has had time to shovel out his or her in-box. THEN send your golden words.

It’s been years since I dealt with an agent. The last one shopped a proposal around half-heartedly. Never gave me a clue where she was sending it and what the responses were. Then she died.

Presumably she was sick. That would explain the feeble marketing.

By then I had a job at the Great Desert University, one that paid a real salary with real benefits and even had a real office with a real computer and a telephone. Wonders never ceased. Oddly, in return they expected me to work, and so my book writing days went into a long pause.

I don’t hold out much hope that any high-powered New York agent is going to pick this project up very soon. And secretly, I hope it takes two or three months before it attracts anyone’s attention.

That’s because I figure it’s going to take at least six months to get the naughty book business up and running. If an agent comes trotting back to me with a contract, it will have the benefit of providing me enough to live on for a year…but it will slow down the p0rn plan by about that long.

An advance of 15 or 20 grand will help capitalize Camptown Races Press. However, it will divide my attention. And I’m finding the new enterprise demands all my attention. Wander off to do something else, and forward momentum instantly comes to a dead stop. I’m not at all sure that trying to budget, say, four hours a day to the Boob Book and four to the new imprint is going to work.

So. The longer it takes to find a publisher, I suppose, the better. Sort of. In a way.