Day 1297: Swing

Philip Beard, author of Swing, was our guest speaker at book club tonight.  I enjoyed the book very much.  The characters were beautifully drawn, the story was compelling and original.   I found his discussion of his writing, editing and publishing process to be even more fascinating.

His first book, Dear Zoe, was picked up and published fairly quickly because he had found an agent to represent him.  Penguin published it and sponsored a three week book tour to promote it, so his sales were quite good.  They published his second novel, but its sales flopped, mostly because they did not promote it at all.

When he finished the third novel, the agent's staff recommended adding a hundred pages.  He developed a bunch of secondary characters and sub stories.   Then Penguin wouldn't touch it because of his previous sales record.  It was rejected by thirty publishers.  After that, he sat on it for a year and a half and finally cut the extra hundred pages which helped pick up the story's pace.  After more rewriting, he was satisfied with it.  Nevertheless, none of the publishers would look at the new version so he wound up self-publishing it.  He hired a professional cover artist and a copy editor.  It's a print on demand strategy, but he always keeps 50 to 100 books to sell when he speaks to groups or distribute to small book stores.

He has now sold the rights to his first book to be produced as a feature film.  What an exciting prospect.  His writing career has had lots of ups and downs, but in ten years, he's published three books.  That's pretty awesome.

Dancing Shiva