First Person

My First Shipwreck

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By James M. Lang

I have known many academic colleagues who have listened longingly to the siren song of the commercial publishing market, and who have dreamed of writing their crossover book -- the one they'll sell to a big New York publishing house, the one that will lift them out of the academic poverty and obscurity in which they toil. I have heard that song, and dreamed that dream myself.

I still have that dream, but I've spent the past six months remembering an important fact about sirens and their songs; they lure you to their island with their promise of perfect happiness, but when you steer your boat toward that harbor, you shipwreck on the treacherous coastal rocks.

When I started writing my crossover book, I imagined I might be able to sell it to a small, niche publisher -- one that specialized either in creative nonfiction, or in health and medicine books. My grandest hopes were that the book might earn me a couple of thousand dollars, either through an advance or through eventual royalties; that it would establish my writing credentials for future creative projects; and that it would offer solace and advice to a group of people who were in need of both.

I called the book Learning Sickness: A Year With Crohn's Disease, which pretty much summarizes the content. The manuscript chronicles a year in which I battled the maddening and frustrating symptoms of a chronic illness which, by some estimates, afflicts as many as 1 million Americans, but has thus far received very little public attention.

I thought it might sell for that reason -- given the potentially huge market of Crohn's disease sufferers, and the lack of published accounts of life with the disease, it seemed like I had found a possible gap in the market.

So, about six months into the writing of the book, when I had completed just four chapters, I began sending out letters to literary agents. In retrospect, I can see that they weren't very good letters. Accustomed to sending out academic writing for publication, I ignored advice to keep my query letters brief, and tried to include everything I wanted to say in long, leisurely, two-page introductions to my book and my life.

Between the first letter I sent out, in August of 2001, and the time I finished the book in May of 2002, I probably received 60 rejections from agents. About seven of them had actually requested to see some sample chapters, but they all ended up rejecting the manuscript.

After school let out in May, I had decided to give up on agents. I arranged with a graduating senior, an excellent writer, to help me do research and send out proposals to small publishing houses. I was ready to go it alone.

And then, on an impulse, I changed my mind and decided to give the agent route one last try. I chopped up my cover letter into a brief, market-focused, one-page query; now that I had finished the book, I had a much clearer picture of what it was about and how to market it, and I conveyed that clearer sense of purpose in the letter. I e-mailed it to 10 agents on a Thursday night.

By Friday afternoon, five agents had requested to see the manuscript. One of them asked me to send it to her exclusively via e-mail, which I did that afternoon. She read it the next day and on Monday sent me a contract to represent the book.

I was astonished. In our conversations over the next couple of weeks, while I made some minor revisions she requested, and while we put together a proposal package of accompanying materials, she told me that she thought we would have a sale within a couple of weeks. I asked her tentatively about what the offers might look like. Worst-case scenario, she said, we would get a measly $10,000; best-case, we could be into six figures.

I couldn't believe it. I walked around in a daze, convinced that my life was about to change. I went to the bookstore and looked at a book on vacationing in the Greek islands; I envisioned taking a semester of leave to begin another book; my wife began dreaming about remodeling the house.

My agent sent me a list of the two dozen publishers to which she had submitted the manuscript, and they were all huge commercial houses. She assured me that all we had to do now was sit back and wait. It was even possible, she thought, that we might spark a bidding war.

I didn't want to waste my summer without starting any new projects, but I found it impossible to concentrate on anything but the book. Mostly I hung around my kids and read. And waited.

And waited. And waited.

The bad news filtered back slowly. The publishers told my agent that medical memoirs, as they were categorizing my book, did not sell well. They all liked the book, but they had "marketing concerns." The editor at the largest publishing house in America told her that he felt guilty for passing on the book, since it was so beautifully written -- but he passed nonetheless.

From the 24 publishers we initially submitted to, we received 24 rejections. My agent drew up a second list -- all publishers whose names, again, I recognized -- and sent it out for another round.

And I'm still waiting.

At last word, three stragglers still have the manuscript. The rest have rejected it, for the same reasons as the first group. I'm not much optimistic that any one of those stragglers will pick up the book, given its track record thus far.

Which means, essentially, that I'm back where I started. If and when the final rejection comes in, I'm going to take my book back from the agent and return to my original plan, and my original hopes: that some small publisher, one that specializes in creative nonfiction or health and medicine, will publish my little memoir; that it will establish my writing credentials; and that it will do some good for some people.

In the meantime, I learned two hard lessons about trying to break out of academic publishing -- a world that I now look at with far more appreciation and affection.

It should surprise no one that commercial publishers focus on the bottom line, even if that means to the exclusion of literary worth. They do not receive subsidies or grants, as many university presses do, and they will remain in existence only if they sell books.

Of course, I knew this theoretically, but it was another thing to learn it on the back of the book to which I devoted a year and a half of my life. I didn't imagine for a minute that I had written the next Angela's Ashes; but, when I thumb through it now, I still see a book that I am proud to have written, and that has received ringing endorsements from the numerous authors to whom I sent the manuscript -- and yet it may never see the outside of my file cabinet.

At least the book helped me establish a relationship with an agent. And while the process of allowing an agent to handle my book has been frustrating in some respects, I know that in the long term it will be essential for my hopes of publishing in the commercial marketplace.

Agents know editors and publishers. They understand the marketplace. They can make telephone calls, have lunches, and break the rules in ways that authors cannot. They work on commission -- at least the reputable ones do -- so they don't make money unless they sell the book. They handle all of the details of submission and negotiation that I would be terrible at.

But they also take your baby away from you. Once your book has made it into the hands of your agent, it has -- at least temporarily -- left your control. It took me several weeks to realize that, once she had taken the book, I had nothing left to do. When you have devoted so much time to a project, that process of letting go can be frustrating and painful.

So I didn't make it to the shore this time. But I have a better map of those rocky waters; I now have a guide to help me along; and I'm not giving up. I'm hard at work on book No. 2.