So You Want to Write a Book? (Monthly Solo)

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In this month’s solo episode, I’m sharing some thoughts on why everyone seems to want a book under their belt, why that may or may not be the right move for you, as well as concrete tips and takeaways about what to think through before you begin putting words on paper. Most importantly, I share some tips and frameworks for getting you through the creative process once you begin.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

ELISE:

Alright, friends, A few months ago I wrote a Substack an answer to one of the most frequent questions that I get, which is in some variation I want to write a book. Can you give me any advice about the process? And yes, I can absolutely give advice about the process. I'll link to this Substack in the show notes, but I wanted to talk about it first as a bit of a philosophical question rather than just a practical one because it's so interesting to me, and I say this with both joy and real curiosity is someone who is a massive reader, obviously and has been my entire life.

I credit the veracity with which I would read books to both my older brother who read all the time and modeled that for me. That was really the way to hang out with him was to sit and read as well. My brother coincidentally became the publisher of a book imprint. He's a book editor, and also that it's what my parents really prized and prioritized and they were not particularly indulgent, although it's easy to look at my childhood and say, wow, you really had a good deal. I really did. We had horses and we lived at the base of a ski mountain, and I had so much access to nature and creative play, and I went to a wonderful hippie alternative school, et cetera. I had it good and my parents were not indulgent with stuff. They just did not like to buy us stuff, which of course, I both respect and have sort of violently overcorrected on in my own life where my children are so indulged.

This is what we do. But the one thing that my parents were indulgent with, and I think that this inspired a lot of my reading, is that they let me order from the Scholastic catalog and they took me to the bookstore and they would buy me books so long as I had read everything that I'd already bought and we, after school, the bus would run the public bus. The most tiny school would run. One of the stops was at the library. So a lot of us spent a lot of time at the Missoula Public Library. It's one of those places that's forever cemented in my mind as you know how you have those places where whenever you're reading something, you imagine the scene taking place. The Missoula Public Library, the old one is one of those places for me. I just spent so much time there as a kid.

But yeah, it just became a big part of my life reading and I would read for Dairy Queen Sundays, there were competitions in the summer and I would sort of read competitively with myself. I made a deal that I would read the hundred best books of the 20th century, et cetera, so I can make anything into a competition. That was a joke that my late brother-in-law Peter would say that my family could turn the bread basket into a competition. I don't think that's totally true, Peter, if you're listening, but point made. So anyway, so reading and books, this is just my life. Fortunately, I'm married to a man who works for a company that makes really beautiful shelving because there is not a spare surface in our house that isn't home to a bookcase and I'm out of room, but alas, okay, so I just establishing narration for the book industry and for writers and simultaneously, it's such a hard business and it's so anemic compared to the amount of engagement that you can rack up in other parts of the internet, for example, that writing a book and recognizing if you're lucky, I think the average book sells 500 copies in the first year.

I don't remember the stats. They're pretty staggering. But if you sell 10,000 copies, you're doing pretty well. It's an anemic business and yet so meaningful. And what's so interesting to me, I can't imagine really doing anything else with my life. I've been writing books for other people, but I've been writing books since I think I was 22 or 23 Ghost writing, and I get a lot of questions about that. So I'll save that for the end practically, what that means and how to get into it. But yeah, I mean I've done it over and over and over with different publishers and different editors, and so interesting to me still how prized writing a book is and how people see it as the ultimate or one of the crowning achievements in their life somehow in our culture, even though I guess we don't really buy that many books or read that many books to be someone worthy of a book, I guess maybe I would put it that way, feels like a crowning achievement for everyone.

Everyone wants a book. And so that's really, it's interesting to me and I get it, and I can sort people into there are sort of the titans who want the memoir, the retelling of their life, or they want to dispense advice that they've learned along the way. There are the experts, the subject matter experts who want to share their frame and their knowledge. Then there are the writers like me, the general nonfiction writers or journalists or reporters who are pulling things together for people, synthesizing, distilling. Then there are memoirists who are a totally special type, who are I think alternately possessed with so rare of a story that they can pull off the me story in the cosmic egg that I like to talk about, which is that the me story is nestled in the we story, which is then nestled in the story. And some people have a real me story and can write.

So I think about books like The Glass Castle or Educated or just those astonishing stories that we encounter in memoir land of like, wow, this is what a life, what an experience, what a story. Those are quite rare really. I think that most memoirists, particularly the successful ones, are the ones where you're like, wow, that was so resonant for me. It's because they managed to connect the me story to the We Story and sometimes to the story. And so there's a deeper resonance with everyone who's reading it, but a lot of people don't do that and try to do just a me story, and I think that's tough or I think you're always served by taking it one step further and trying to understand the universal chords of your experience, because many of us share stories and have had very similar experiences. And when you can find those within yourself, I think you have the opportunity to create a lot more ripples with your work than trying to express how deeply singular your story is.

That's a hard task. And so that's the memoirs. And then of course there's fiction and fiction writers and literary fiction and romantic and science, a million different genres. There are poets, et cetera, essayists more in the nonfiction space. But short story writers, I don't know as much about the world of fiction. I used to compulsively read only fiction until about I turned about 30 and then it's been nonfiction as I've tried to harvest the meaning of my life and understand what I'm up to. Who knows? I'm still trying to figure it out, but I love fiction. I think I'd be daunted to attempt fiction because my standards would be high for myself, and I'm sorry friends, but I'm not Wallace Stegner.

So anyway, those are sort of the book genres. But again, going back to this idea that everyone wants a book and I don't know, I think about this all the time, is it because somehow it's the only way that we have in this increasingly digital world to memorialize our legacy or to concretize our thinking? That's very much what it feels like for me and why I love writing books. I love frameworks if you haven't noticed, and I love to wrestle my ideas to the ground and get them into shape and to find the patterns and synthesize the patterns and pull different writers and different thinkers from different verticals, sort of polymath it out for people where I can quote psychologists and theologians and philosophers and neuroscientists, et cetera. I can synthesize them in a single chapter. And that to me is just flow. It is so fun.

It feels like I'm touching some sort of universal truth and making it more obvious and apparent. It feels a bit like unearthing what's already present and already there, but maybe we haven't put them pieces together to see it in that way. And I get high from writing in that way. That's really what I like to do is bigger thinky books. So for some people, I think that that's really resonant. What I often hear when people approach me and ask me about books, it's that there, my first piece of advice to memoirs, make sure it's a we story or even the story and not just a me story, but with general nonfiction. My advice is that it's really not worth doing unless you go for the biggest idea possible. And going for really big ideas is a lot of work, and it's hard, but I just don't know if I think it's worth it as someone who has done it so many times, unless you are moon shotting.

And I say that because to write a book takes years. I don't think people really realize this first in a nonfiction process, fiction is sold off of a finished manuscript, so you're committing to writing your novel before you send it to your agent. If you have one before it goes out to editors and then you edit it and shape it with the editor, which I'm sure it can take an awfully long time, but with nonfiction, you sell it off of a proposal proposal. There's some variety and I've written enough books that I can sort of get away with some shortcuts or tweaking the format a little bit. But traditionally, a nonfiction proposal would be an introduction. It would be a detailed outline of the book, it would be a sample chapter, it would be a marketing plan, you know, how you intend to sell the book, who would support you, so on and so forth, and all of your other marketing measures.

Unfortunately, just a big part of it at this point, as there are fewer and fewer distribution channels for book, it's more and more on writers to generate audiences for their material. So that already is a really big bite. I mean, I did 17 rounds on my proposal with my agent for on our best behavior, and some of those were small little things and changes, but she really pushed me and I'm very grateful it was worth it, but it was a very long process to get it to the place that it was ready to go out to editors and then it goes out to editors, and if you're lucky, there's some interest and you get an auction going where houses are bidding against each other. There aren't that many houses publishing houses because there are a lot of imprints, but houses typically only one imprint. They only allow one imprint to bid so that they're not bidding against themselves.

So there will be an internal discussion if there are multiple imprints who are interested about who has the strongest vision for the book. And then if you're lucky, you get an auction going and you sell your book and then you need to write it, which and my experience takes a year really to get a substantive draft, and I'm pretty fast. We'll talk more about the process in a minute of how I write. And then you go through a really intense editing process depending on the tenacity of your editor and your agent. And so let's say it's two years before your manuscript is ready to go into production, at which point it's going into the copy editors multiple times into production, it's being laid out. Again, this is a really long process, at which point it needs to be printed overseas, et cetera. So when you go into production, you're still likely a year out from the publication of your book.

And then you've really just started because if you're lucky, people will want to talk to you about what you've written and you'll need to drum up press and podcast appearances and all sorts of integrations wherever you can to try and get people to buy your book. So in some ways it just starts, that's the point. And financially, the way that it works is for nonfiction, you're given an advance that you would earn out. And if you earn out your advance, you then go on to earn royalties. But most writers don't come close to earning out their advances. So this is the money that you're going to get for your book, most likely, unless you are one of the very few people who write a gushing bestseller. And in which case you might earn royalties, but most likely this is it. And say you get an advance and your agent takes 15% and then that advance is amortized over five or six years.

So you get a quarter when you sign, you get a quarter when you deliver your manuscript, you get a quarter when your hardcover publishes, and then you get a quarter the year after when the paperback publishes. And so it's not annual salary, which as you can imagine when you start to do the math, you realize, oh, this is a tough business. This is a tough business. I love writing books. I will hopefully always have the opportunity to continue writing books both for myself and other people. And still, it's not the way to get rich, I'll just say that it does. I think one of the draws for people, I think that there's what I mentioned, the intellectual draw of taking your ideas and getting them down on the page and figuring out what you really think and concretizing it and formalizing it and really thinking it through in a very, very, very rigorous way that is just so rewarding outside of any other material rewards.

And so for some of you listening, that might be enough that should in some ways be enough. And for some people, and this is completely valid too, who are personalities or have other things going in their lives, writing a book becomes an opportunity to cement a platform and to figure out who you are and what you're up to in the world, and then to have an opportunity or reason to go out and do a bunch of press. And in that sense, the book, I think for some people feels like a really good move, like a branding tool for being a serious person in the world and having something substantive to be interviewed about and to talk about. And so I think that's another completely valid reason for writing a book. I think you can't tell doing it for financial reasons is less so unless you're mega famous, unless you're going to get an amazing advance and hire a ghost writer like me and make some money on it, that's very rare.

I think that doesn't really generally happen. But there are some people obviously for whom it's a nice line in their annual p and l, but again, not common and maybe not a reason to do it, but who's to say? So that's sort of the nuts and bolts of it, and I think it's really worth thinking that through. And again, I go back to this idea for any therapist who are listening or people who feel like this is their opportunity to create a platform and or really identify who they are and what they stand for in the world, make it as big as possible because the effort, you don't want to write a small book, you just don't. It won't be memorable. It's really hard for a small book to pop and you want it to be as big and wide as possible to give it its best chance of having a life.

Speaking of having a life, and I've written about this before as well, I've talked a lot of friends through this, which is when you spend and I tell the story about, still makes me laugh, but when on Our Best Behavior came out and granted I made the New York Times bestseller list, which you find out a week and change later, and the book has done really nicely. It's not like a gusher, but it's done really well and has found its audience and continues to sell. And I'm so grateful for that truly. But I was feeling really good on Pub Day. I had done The Today Show. My brother had a really beautiful book party for me, and I got to see so many people I love on the East Coast. And Pub Day came the next day, this all happened the day before. And my parents were in town and we went for Chinese food and we went to MoMA and just wandered around and nothing happened, which was fine.

And then that night Rob and I went to have dinner with some of our close friends and we went by McNally Jackson in soho, which had moved to this glorious new spot. And when I lived in New York, I lived around the corner from the McNally Jackson in Nolita, and I spent all of my expendable income there. I was there every weekend day. And so I was like, I just really want to see my book in the wild. I haven't seen it in the wild. And so we went into McNally Jackson and I'm looking around, I go to the new releases table, I see the people who publish that week, nice healthy stacks of their books. And I go, I just wander around. I go to gender studies, I go to wellness. I'm like, where is it? History? It's kind of a hard book to classify philosophy.

I'm just wandering around and running out of time before our dinner reservation. And so finally I sheepishly go to the front and I say, I wrote a book that came out today. I don't know if you have any copies. And she looks it up on the computer and she says, oh yeah, we have, I can't remember if she said they had two copies or three. She was like, it must be in the back. Let me go see if I can find it. And yeah, I wanted to die. So Rob and I stood there awkwardly for 10 minutes while she looked for my book, which she did not find while we were there. And so finally I was like, let's just go. This is too humiliating. And so we left. And then my friend Roman a Lam who's a novelist, a wonderful novelist, we used to work at Lucky Magazine together in our early twenties.

He texted me and said, I'm at McNally Jackson. She found your book. I bought one, I think it was two copies. I bought one copy and there's one copy left and it's perfect. That's your praying for your daily humiliation. That's the reality. I very rarely see my book in the wild. It's still so exciting when it's actually on display. So I say that because I have talked and walked with many heartbroken friends who are not hardened writers, but who write books because it feels like a platform play. It feels like a life-changing event. It feels like it will be the thing to transform their lives and launch their therapy practices or whatever they may be, only to find that nothing happens. And this is the most common story. Anne Lamont has a hilarious and bird by bird, which I highly recommend reading for anyone who wants to write, but you really don't need to enjoy it.

I mean, Ann Lamont makes everything fun. She is, to me, goals I long for the day when I can just write a beautiful 120 page book and put it out there. So first she has this line the months before a book comes out of the shoot are for most writers right up there with the worst life has to offer pretty much like the first 20 minutes of Apocalypse Now with Martin Sheen in the motel room in Saigon, totally decompensating the waiting and the fantasies, both happy and grim wear you down, and that's totally accurate. And then she has this hilarious moment. I don't have the exact line, but she tells the story of one of her books coming out and a friend was publishing on the same days and they just called each other and just started laughing hysterically because well, nothing happened. So this is the reality, which doesn't mean that you shouldn't do it, but I think that right sizing your expectations is really helpful.

And realizing it's like any big life event. Anyone who's gone through any big transition, when your life feels transformed, you've just put out, you've given birth really. And it's not everyone else's biggest day ever too. That's a bit like the feeling. It's like this thing is happening to me and I'm molting in public, and yet nobody notices, nobody cares. It's not the biggest thing happening in their lives too. And that's just always a weird feeling. Anyone who has lost someone knows that feeling. When you're blinking into the sunlight and watching people get their frappuccinos and you're like, but my best friend died. How are you carrying on as though nothing has changed. It's a bit like that. So I don't want to be Debbie Downer, but I do think it's important to balance all of this. The journey of this book, taking out any potential for what might happen when it comes out needs to be worth it anyway, regardless. You would need to feel like it's a worthwhile endeavor even if only your parents read it because it can feel like that's the result.

And I write about this in the Substack if you want to just read it, but I wanted to offer some other advice. If you do decide you want to pull the trigger. And the first is read a lot. Nothing drives me more batty than when people tell me that they want to write a book. And I ask them what books that are in the field or on which they would like to write a book they most admire and what writers they aspire to be like, et cetera. And they tell me that they don't really read. That's not good read. If you don't love reading, if you don't love being in writer's worlds with them and studying how they're getting their arguments across and how they're structuring their chapters and how they're bringing you through the material, you really don't have any business writing a book.

And I say the same, and I hear this and I get this to some extent. Sometimes I feel like I'm taking in so much I need to turn down the volume so that I can focus on my own work. I understand that. But I also will hear people say to me, oh, I don't want to read your book because I'm working on my own similar book. And it's like, guys, sure, fine, but we're all pulling from the same collective unconscious and we're all building on each other's work. And that is a massive privilege. And I love, I sort of trip over myself trying to cite other people because I think thinking with people and building on their work and integrating their work is so fun. It's called endnotes, it's called Bibliography. It's footnotes. I'm so wary of books written by experts that don't have footnotes.

I mean, some people are telling dispensing their life advice and whatnot, and it's not relevant. But if you are writing a book of ideas and theories and arguments and you're not citing profusely, something's weird. I think. So it's like my own little pet peeve just recognized, we're all influenced by each other. We're all swimming in the same ocean, we're all exposed to the same ideas, and that's fine. I think very rarely are people truly original. Mostly we are making discoveries tangential to other people's work or putting them together in interesting ways that are novel and original, but that originality is kind of a fool's errand and you're better served by integrating and building and including other people's work. It's amazing to be in community with so many brilliant people. In my experience, I love to quote this moment in the creation of feminist consciousness. This is historian girdle Lerner who put together the first women's studies program, but she writes about, I just found this so moving about how back in the day, women needed to be cloistered in order to be literate.

And so our literate women, the women who were writing were cloistered nuns for the most part, and they were siloed from each other and not in communication with each other, and they were often making concurrent revelations and realizations in their work, but because they couldn't talk to each other, it couldn't sort of speed light years ahead, which happens when you get the synergy going of working with other people's material and co-creating with other people across time. And her point is that up to the 17th century, I'm quoting her learned women are extremely rare. We can identify perhaps 30 learned nuns in the period up to 1400 and some of the most accomplished of these such as Hildegard of Bingen were unable to write in Latin. So she says that one can safely say that up to 1700, there are fewer than 300 learned women in Western Europe known to historians.

And so what a privilege to be alive now and to be able to be in conversation with each other. So read a lot, read a lot, let yourself be influenced. Let your ideas be emboldened and bolstered by other people's thoughts as well. I keep really meticulous notes. This is specific to the type of writing that I do, but I would develop some sort of notetaking system for yourself where you're leaving yourself voice memos or you're dictating things and having them transcribed. When I read books, I mark passages, then I go back through and I type it all up so that I have a massive reference system for finding quotes, and then I print them out and I flag them. And I have a million manual processes that I go through that are part of, I don't know if some of them are security blankets, but it's just how I keep myself organized and make sure that I'm either including what I intend to include or making a decision not to include it, but not driving myself crazy, worrying that I'm forgetting something important.

And as you go ask yourself a hard and important question, is this really a book? There are so many books again that aren't big enough that really should be a Substack newsletter or a podcast episode that are not a book. You want to, again, go big and go hard. A lot of people that I encounter really are desperate to skip that proposal writing process that I described to you earlier. Don't skip it unless you're essentially famous and have the platform needed to write anything and be able to sell it to an editor and then get it going with a high quality writer. You need to write a proposal that is not a step that you should skip. Everyone I know who just rushes into the book writing process without figuring that out, regrets it and then ends up having to go back and do a proposal later and then rewrite their manuscript.

This happens all the time. Now, your proposal will be different than the book. Very rarely does material even make it into the final manuscript from the proposal, but it is not a lost effort because again, you are scaffolding, you're creating the scaffolding for your thoughts and you're figuring out what you intend to do, which leads me to probably the most important piece of advice I can give you, which is to know what you're going to do before you sit down and write. And you want to create a really solid container. And for me, that's an incredibly robust outline and chapter formulas and understanding exactly what you need in order to make the points. In my experience, spending the time, structure and outline is never wasted and will save you hugely when it's time to actually write. So I mentioned it takes maybe a year to write a draft.

It's pretty fast. Some books take much longer, but I can write incredibly fast because I know what I'm going to do before I sit down and start writing. So very rarely do I find myself at the end of something thinking, what is this? I don't know what this stream of consciousness is, but it's not a chapter. And I am able to be so efficient and fast because I have spent days, weeks, months, years processing this information maybe in my subconscious, I'm not sure before. I'm like, okay, I understand exactly what I'm going to do here and how I'm going to do it, and then I let it go. It's a bit like giving birth. It just comes out fast. That's how it feels for me. But I highly recommend establishing a really robust container and letting that do a lot of the work for you.

It also makes it so much easier to go back in and edit or revise when you're not swimming in your own text copy, trying to follow your chain of thought. However many months later. For example, with my Substack, I am working on and by working on, I say that very loosely, but I have 10 newsletters that I'm kind of writing, and most of them I haven't started typing, but I know what I'm going to write about. They're in the back of my mind. I'm looking for sort of the points I want to make, and then I just have this go moment where I'm like, this is the one, and then I write it. But that time is never poorly spent.

My next piece of advice is to get a therapist, which might sound funny. I think this is incredibly important for any memoir activity. And I give this advice to everyone that I ghost write for because that's typically more in the memoir family. You're going to need a therapist because when you start digging up your stories and rehashing and thinking about your life in retrospect, even if you feel like you've had a really blessed life, it's hard. It's emotionally incredibly difficult. And everyone I know who's gone through this process has then simultaneously experienced. I used to think that I was a bad luck charm, and now I recognize that this is just part of the process. But marriages end relationships end almost to a one something really intense. Jobs end really something really intense happens because you're stirring the contents of your life. And sometimes all the things as we write and work through the book, like, oh, I wasn't conscious of this pattern that I've been exhibiting throughout my whole life, and now I see what I'm up to and I need to do something different.

So get a therapist again. It sounds silly, but it's very intense, very intense work in a way that you don't really think it will be. Figure out your creative clock. I mean, some people really benefit. This is not me from writing for two hours a day at really prescribed hours. I feel like I hear this mostly from my friends who write fiction. That's not how it works for me. I am either on or off. And as mentioned, I'm spending a lot of time processing before I'm ready to write. So it's more that when I'm ready to write, I try and clear the decks of my calendar so that I can just go for eight hours a day and write 10,000 words in a weekend. But start to pay attention to your own creative rhythm so that you can work with it. Absolutely take time and bake this time into your schedule to put your work away and take a finished chapter, put it away, and don't mess with it at least a month.

It might be longer. You want to come back to it with fresh eyes because several things happen. Sometimes you're like, wow, this is really good loving. This is fun. Sometimes you're like, I don't know what I'm talking about. I cannot follow my own train of thought. Sometimes it's easier to see where you're dragging on or it's boring or it's slow. So really build in that time to come back to your work and look at it with fresh eyes. Highly, highly recommend. And then be prepared to meet your own resistance. You're going to hit a wall or multiple walls in any writing endeavor where you are just like, I don't want to keep going. I can't do it. It's awful. And I hit that point for sure on our best behavior. And I just happened to be having dinner with my friend Taylor, who's a screenwriter, and he was like, oh yeah, you're in the belly of the beast and I can tell you that your editor is right and you are wrong, and you need to take her advice, which at that point was to restructure a significant part of my book because again, I thought I had enough structure, but I didn't.

So I've made this mistake as well, and he took me, I followed him home, and he gave me Do the Work, which is a book. It's a very short book by Steven Pressfield. And it's just about this moment of resistance that all writers, maybe all creatives meet, where it's like you're just under the covers and you're crying and you want to throw in the towel and you're like, I don't want to do it. I give up. This is too hard. I hate this project. And you just need to know that you're going to meet that resistance and that resistance is the drive shaft that's going to move your project to the next level. You have to let it happen and it will wear you down and it will feel like the end of the world. And then you're going to an aha moment where you are like, oh, I understand how to resolve this and I have the energy to do all of the work required, and I'm excited about this, and wow, this is so much better.

So just recognize you're going to hit that resistance point. Alright, let me just very briefly for people who have asked many times how I've got into ghost writing and how they could also get into ghost writing. So I was a magazine writer slash editor, and I was approached. The first book I did was a style guide and an editor saw my name and the masthead, and this was the sort of content that I was doing. I was out Lucky Magazine. I was writing how to fashion content. So I was, don't know, 23 or 24. And Lauren Conrad was the world's most famous person, and they had wanted to do a style guide. And so she recognized my name as mentioned, my brother is a book editor, and so she thought maybe we were related and they brought me in and I'd never done a book before and I was paid as someone who had never done a book before, but it was worth it for the experience.

And that was my first ghostwriting job. And then I did it again for Lauren. We did a beauty book and then it was sort of off to the races because once you start, you can quickly build a reputation and name for yourself as someone who is easy to work with and who writes clean copy. And as a ghost writer, you're sort of also functioning as an editor because you have perspective on the material. It's not your own. There's no ego. It's much easier to structure someone else's work. And so it makes the editing process a lot easier because the editor or the book editor is essentially getting something that's already edited. So that's how I started. And then obviously over time came to take on Meteor and meteor books that were much more aligned with my interests. But hey, I've done it all. I've done style guides, I've done interior design books, I've done memoirs, I've done business How to, I've done, I've written a lot of books at this point, which is wild.

It just keeps happening. So if you want to get into it, I think the best way is to find someone. This might sound like outlandish advice, but if you've never written a book and you don't have anything like that on your cv or you're not a magazine editor or writer and you don't have any connections in the industry where you might be someone who could be picked, often writers get asked to ghostwrite because they've been through the process, they understand how it works, the editor knows that they can do it. So published writers are an easy pick for this, including novelists who sometimes ghostwrite, memoir, et cetera. But I would say what I would do is pitch a project with someone who has the marketing platform to, or the notoriety or the fame or the existing platform to be able to actually commercially make a book viable.

And so I would approach someone who doesn't have a book and say, Hey, I think you should have a book. I would love to write a book with you. And I would write Spec intro or something. I would do the proposal on spec. You wouldn't get paid, and if it sells, you could prefigure out a deal. I think that's your best shot. I think it's hard to get picked for this if you've never done it. I got lucky. But I think that if you don't have an easier, what I would do is I would find someone to collaborate with and do it on spec. Worst case, you go through the proposal process and you don't sell the book and it's a waste of your time and energy, but it might work. And then once you've done one, it's a lot easier to get your next one.

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