I suppose it’s appropriate that my first full-length blog
post on this page has a title that contains several questions, since the book
itself opens with a chapter called “The Importance of Questions.” The answers
to the (six) questions posed by the title could take the space of another book,
but I will try to compress a bit.
As all writers know, writing a book and getting it published
are two entirely different things. I don’t have a terribly clear answer as to
why I began “writing” this book, other than I have always loved writing (this
is not my first book) and at some point I thought it would be good to put many
of my thoughts about science and my growing Christian faith on (what has now
become metaphorical) paper. I put the word writing in quotes in the previous sentence,
because what turned into this book began about a decade ago with putting
together a bunch of paragraphs and snippets from earlier writings. From then
until my retirement in 2015, the book grew slowly as I added more material,
moved stuff around, and began thinking about what I really wanted to say.
With advice and help from my wife (more about her below), I
started working on the book in earnest after retirement. I started constructing
chapters, threw out a lot, and tried to develop some themes and consistency.
A couple of years later, in the summer of 2017, I began
showing the chapters to my wife, Aniko. Although not a native speaker, she is
an expert linguist, writer, and editor in English, as well as a brilliant
researcher (which is the only reason that some of my initial errors in the
science part of the book were corrected). She began to edit the chapters as I
finished what I thought was the final version (Ha!). I had another
reader/editor, a friend from my church, Mark Meredith, the husband of our
pastor (Pastor Martha Meredith wrote one of the endorsements of the book). Mark
was and remains a huge supporter of the book and is also a skilled editor with
a slightly different perspective on some of the material that either Aniko or I
had. During the late summer and fall of 2017, I was sending chapters to Mark,
and then giving those edited pages to Aniko for the (as we began calling them,
somewhat prematurely) the “final final” versions.
In late 2017, I began to think about the terrifying process
of seeing if I could find some way to get the book published. My initial
thought had been self-publishing, based on a realistic appraisal of the chances
of any new, unknown author finding a publisher or an agent. Those odds have
been estimated at around 1%, but I decided to at least give it a try before
going the self-publishing route. I found a list of Christian literary agents
and began writing proposals. From my experience as a research scientist and
then an administrator of the review of research proposals at the NIH, I had
learned the most important thing about writing proposals: FOLLOW THE
INSTRUCTIONS!!!
This meant writing a different proposal for each agency,
since, of course, they all have different requirements for what to include and
how. One size definitely does not fit all, and the chance that an agent will
even look at a book proposal, which is already quite low, drops to zero if the
supplicant does not follow the submission guidelines precisely.
So I wrote about a half dozen different proposals and sent
them out in two batches. The first batch of three got one reply: “Thank you—this
looks interesting, but I cannot take it on.” I focused on the “interesting”
part and was encouraged. The next set of three included one to an agent at the
Steve Laube Agency, which everyone on the internet seemed to agree was the best
Christian literary agency in the country. I sent the proposal to Dan Balow, a
relative newcomer to the agency who specialized in non-fiction, and whose blog
I liked. Yes, when pitching to an agent, learn who they are, and what they
want. It’s worth the time and effort. At least it was in my case, because on January 16, 2018, I got a reply from Dan
telling me he found the proposal interesting—and could we talk on the phone the
next day?
I was stunned, flabbergasted, amazed, grateful, and totally euphoric. (Aniko sometimes says I am prone to what she calls Syperbole—I don’t know where she gets that idea.) The next day Dan and I had a great conversation, and he became my agent. We quickly finished the final edits on the final chapters, sent him a full manuscript, and began the next phase of the publication adventure—waiting for news.
Stay tuned for the rest of the story, coming soon.
