I’ve been working away at my book proposal lately.  Trying to get a draft done by the end of August or so.

Curious at all about the whole process of getting a book published?  It’s a fascinating process.  Basically if you hope that your book could have a wide and large audience, you don’t want to self-publish.  You don’t want to write the book first.  You need to write what’s known as a book proposal, which follows a set form.

You then want to find a literary agent who will take your book proposal and shop it around to different publishers.  Those publishers will all bid on your book – what kind of monetary advance will they provide to the author, and how much effort will they put in to advertising and promotion?   Then you choose it and go from there.  Your agent gets a cut of what you make, but it’s well worth it because then your success is their success.  They also help you edit your proposal and handle all the meetings and networking with publishers.  Sam Harris wrote a good summary of the process here: How to Get your Book Published in 6 (Painful) Steps.  Yup, it’s painful but I’m trying to just stick with it!

A proposal has 3 parts.  The first part is what you’d think of as a proposal.  You try to hook a publisher company with your idea/book and why you just have to write this book.  Second, there’s a detailed table of contents.  And third, there’s a sample chapter.  This doesn’t have to be an actual chapter but can be parts of the best of your writing and best bits of your book.  It’s meant to show publishers what your writing style is like.  So I’m being sure to have a mix of storytelling and “serious non-fiction” type writing in mine.

Here’s the first couple of pages from the first section of my proposal!

When I was a kid, two seemingly tiny experiences planted seeds in my mind and heart that would later grow to shape the whole course of my life.  

An educational banner ran along the perimeter of my 3rd grade classroom, just below the ceiling.  It was a hierarchy of learning and knowledge, progressing from rote memorization to the pinnacle, synthesis.  As a young budding perfectionist, but not knowing what “synthesis” actually meant, the word got filed away in the back of my mind under the following labels: important, big, best, wow.

I grew up Presbyterian, in a very loving and both politically and religiously conservative family.  We went to church every week, and I always had to dress up in black slacks and a white collared button-up shirt; my dad would brush my and my older brother’s hair with a very stiff brush to make our typically-unkempt selves presentable before the Lord.  I enjoyed going to church, “big” church, that is, which is what we called the church service for adults.  I didn’t really like Sunday School because the kids weren’t very nice. I had big glasses, braces (orthodontics), and it didn’t help that I was the only kid dressed up.  I generally understood from “big” church that important and profound things were discussed there, and I wondered how and if people at church might live differently than my family based on this profundity.

In high school, I decided to give youth group a try even though almost all of the kids were from a rival high school since our church was in a different school district.  Youth group was actually fine; kids were neither nice nor mean. I was just there, but maybe that meant I paid more attention to what was actually being said, or sung, as is often the case in youth groups.

Words from one song in particular etched themselves deep inside me, a mystery that would take some serious synthesis to solve.  The song went like this: “God’s gonna move in this pla-a-a-ce, God’s gonna move in this pla-a-a-ce, God’s gonna turn the world, oh-oh upside down.”  Then if that wasn’t paradoxical enough, the next line was “One name under Heaven, whereby we must be saved.” What the heck does it mean that the world will be turned upside down, for God to move in a place, and why is there only one name under which we must be saved?  These two experiences – a fascination with synthesis as the highest form of knowledge and the youth group lyrics hinting at the transformative power of religion yet causing dogmatic discomfort – would set me on a journey full of ups and downs, mistakes and successes, being judged and feeling free.  At the time, these were only vague, unformed questions and seeds taking root in the back of my mind but in college they slowly came to forefront and were watered and fertilized.