Past Medical History II

It’s time for an update.

2013 started off with every indication of being a banner year for art here at the DS Art Studio. In 2012 I was only able to scratch out 3 – count ’em, three – new drawings, and I wanted the New Year to be different. And so it was; by the end of February I had already doubled last year’s tally, polishing off six new medical pieces that would edge me closer to finishing a long-delayed picture book, and laying out two new larger designs that would be great money-makers for the winter holiday season.

Then I got tangled up in a bunch of short stories. An earlier post tells the gritty details. For now, let’s just say I have written enough stories to fill a book, and decided to try and get that book published.

Turns out, it’s not so easy. And after learning as much as I can about this confusing, capricious, multifaceted and multilayered industry, we’ve decided that if Past Medical History is going to get published at all, we’re going to have to do it ourselves.

Past Medical History

We’ve been down this road before. 

Several years ago we crowd-sourced the funding for a coffee table book, a collection of drawings from my first twenty years in the studio. That project allowed us to take an idea that we pasted together from Word documents and Scotch tape, and turn it into a reality.

It also gave us the experience of trusting our art customers to support us in a risky undertaking – and that trust paid off. We were able to take our book to press, and our supporters received the first copies of what became a very successful commercial effort.

(Strangely enough, publishers and book dealers actually told us not to do it. They said we were wasting our time, and we would never sell enough of the books to cover our expenses. But we didn't listen – and when the picture book sold out, we reissued it last year in a new paperback edition.)

Well we’re not listening this time, either.  We figure if this process worked so well for a book of pictures, it will work for a book of stories, too – especially when the stories tell where the pictures came from. Only now, we’re not expecting our art customers to do all the heavy lifting. We’re going to tell everybody we know, and a whole bunch of people we never even met.

This time around, we’re planning to partner with Indiegogo to raise the money we’ll need to publish our book.

We’re not quite ready to pull the trigger on our fundraising campaign yet, but everything should come together in another week or two. 

Right now we’re putting the finishing touches on the video we will use to introduce the book project to potential donors. We've collected all the footage, gathered all the images, and even have a terrific musical soundtrack, courtesy of our friends from the band Stegosaurus.

Once the video is complete, we’ll kick off our crowdsourcing campaign, giving everyone the chance to get an advance, first-edition copy of the book – and even have their name included in the Acknowledgements.

For now, though, it’s back to the drawing board, er, editing room. Don't worry, I will start drawing pictures again one of these days. One day real soon. I’m sure of it.

Past Medical History

Once upon a time I wrote a book. Actually, I have been writing for years, usually during the slow art selling season around January and February, before art show activity picks up again in the springtime. Short stories, mostly, very much like the ones that get posted here. 

Owl

This year, though, I was talking to a friendly professional acquaintance who is a writer, a real one, a famous one, who also publishes a line of his own books. I asked him if his company would consider publishing my next coffee table book, a collection of medical drawings that I've been threatening to print for a really long time. (Just as soon as I finish the drawings, which have grown from twenty, to thirty, to now nearly sixty, and still only ten or fifteen to go.)

He politely said no - picture books are not the kind of thing they do - but he did express some interest in another project I had in mind, maybe in another year or two from now, when I could pull together enough short stories to make it work. I figured I would need around thirty of the short stories I'd been working on, sporadically,  to tell my story - the tale of a young doctor who up and quit the business one day, and somewhere along the way decided to become an artist. Seemed like a story worth telling, and I thought I had a good start, somewhere in a file folder on my computer.

So I looked for a file called "Medical Book", where I soon discovered there were nearly100 documents gathering virtual dust, some long, some short, the majority of them already finished, each waiting quietly and patiently for a final edit.

In no time I was able to pull together 45 of these short essays, arranged them in loose chronological order, and discovered that together they constituted the arc of a story. I had a book.

Past Medical History was  born. 

Nothing to do but try and get it published. 



My friend the writer is swamped with other projects. He and others in the industry (in fact, everyone I knew who was even remotely associated with the publishing biz) told me there was but one alternative: Pitch my book to an agent, who would then pitch my book to a real, mainstream publisher.

Such began a process of self-education that has now lasted a couple of months, an adventure that has been at least as complex and fraught with pitfalls as anything I ever encountered in medical school, involving the multiple and oft-counterexclusive paths of mainstream publishing, vanity publishing, self- and assisted self-publishing, e-publishing, POD and POD (yes, there are two, sometimes used interchangeably), and giving up entirely. Not to mention e-mails, Query Letters, Synopses, Biographies, Overviews and Hooks, each an essential part of the cryptic language that transcends common business communication in meaning, intensity and importance.

What's more, there is a formulaic family of documentary formats that must be scrupulously followed in applying to publishing representatives of all stripes, no matter what their submission guidelines may imply to the contrary, with the added challenge of subtle, agent-specific, custom modification requirements representing a maze of tripwires in a minefield of minutia that all but guarantees failure for the novice writer. 

And all this just to convince someone to agree to accept a manuscript for review.

It has been, and remains, a challenge. But we persevere, and by now a formal Book Proposal for Past Medical History has been crafted, meticulously formatted, and recently posted on Scribd, should any sympathetic book agents or editors find their way here to catch the link (and perhaps tell me which portions of the proposal must be double-spaced, as opposed to those pages that will cause the entire project to be scrapped if they are mistakenly made so). In the meantime, all are invited to follow along with me on Facebook to watch as this adventure continues to unfold.

Please bring coffee.