Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

I mentioned last Wednesday that I've been reading Patricia L. Fry's The Successful Writer's Handbook. This gave me multiple ideas for how to make strides in my writing career. This weekend, I got started on a couple of those ideas.

Fry suggested that, if you're going to write a book, it should be something that you like writing about, something you could see yourself spending a lot of time thinking about and talking about for the next couple of years.

As I thought about it, I realized that, now that I've gone through a year of wedding planning and had a very successful wedding, I have a lot to say on wedding planning.

But I'm not the only one. Many of my friends and acquaintances do, as well.

In the second category were books created by industry insides, such as wedding magazines, with a vested interest in selling you stuff.

A third category focuses on planning a budget wedding, offering alternatives to the aspects of a traditional wedding. However, these books didn't offer much in terms of creative ideas.

We drew most of our creative ideas from weddings we'd attended, advice we heard from others, brainstorming with friends and family, or through ideas I pulled off bulletin boards at wedding Web sites. I got a small number of ideas from wedding magazines, although many of the products sold and discussed in those magazines are on the pricey side. The wedding mags were primarily helpful as a resource on etiquette and in-depth articles on different aspects of planning. However, all of those articles did tend to be written by an industry insider, and in the articles where they showed what a real bride had been, it was nearly always over-the-top.

It occurred to me that I could write a great book from talking to women who have planned their own weddings: in particular, talk about how they personalized it to make it their own, and what advice they would give to others. The book will be called My Wedding, My Way: Real Women, Real Weddings, Real Budgets. I'll be posting more about it as I continue to work on it, including a separate page about the book.

Fry recommends that you write a book proposal, even if you're planning on self-publishing, which at this point I am. So Saturday, I put everything together: an estimated word count, synopsis, list of resources, promotional plan, market analysis, author bio, and chapter overview. The Handbook, of course, provides details on what should go in each of these sections.

I think that creating the book proposal was an excellent idea, because it helped me to focus my ideas about the book. Plus, I could include the synopsis in e-mails I sent out to all the married women in my address book, asking them if I could interview them. Several have already responded that they'll help, and I'm setting up interview times with them.

If all goes well, I'll do the bulk of the interviews over the next couple of months, write the book in the spring and finish it in time for the big wedding planning season of the summer.

I also thought about the books I've already published, to think of ways to market them better. Of course, there are many things I could do. One of the problems in recent months has been that the site I was using to sell the e-books has since gone under. This means that my book, Stay Out of the Bin! An Editor's Tips on Getting Published in Lit Mags, has been effectively out of print for a while.

Previously, I'd had a couple versions of it printed up and bound, but the way I did it — as an 8 1/2 x 11 booklet with a clear cover and bound side like a manual — was somewhat unwielding and too expensive to interest anyone. So I spoke to Kinko's about the possibility of printing it as a smaller booklet and thought the price sounded reasonable.

I spent some time on Sunday, with The Gryphon's help, reformatting it for smaller pages. That evening I dropped it at Kinko's and, since the price was reasonable, ordered 20. I'll take them to upcoming events I attend and see if there's any interest.

I also registered to sell it on eBookMall.com, where it should be available within a couple weeks. Once it is, I'll put more effort into promoting it and possibly writing a companion book on how to write a publishable poem.

It feels good to be back in the game!

Copyright 2006 by Alyce Wilson

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