As you may recall I posted a couple of weeks ago about my concerns for my Alaska Flying book. My agent Michele started sending it out to editors last December and now, at more than seven months into the process, I was fairly certain that it was not going to find a home.

And I was right.

Michele and I talked on Friday and although the book has received some interest (it is about flying in Alaska after all) editors think it would not sell more than 1500 copies and consider it as a paperback original. That kind of tepid support from the get-go isn't all that impressive (the paperback doesn't bother me, but planning for it to sell in small numbers seems kind of self-defeating) and Michele thinks we should hold off on it right now. The big concern is that I'm a debut author with a short story collection - even though the book is not really a short story collection - and so editors don't see me as a good risk. What they want is nonfiction (aviation's version of The Deadliest Catch).

I could not write the flying book as nonfiction - there was no way I was going to reveal the true identities for all the pilots involved in those stories. I have been working on the memoir for a little while now though and trying to place myself at center stage while still telling flying stories - mostly about guys who died as their mistakes are already a matter of public record. (Although I don't think I will use any of their real names as that just doesn't seem fair.) Michele is pretty confident that the memoir would be a hit with publishers and she could tag the other book along with it. The theory is that the memoir would be fairly popular and then with that added name recognition, the second book would sell better.

So I need to get cranking on this AK memoir.

I'm surprisingly okay with this - oddly okay, really. I got such amazing feedback from so many of you when I first posted my concerns about the whole deal and I think it was Gwenda who told me that it might be better to hold on to the book until a publisher really wanted it. Seems like an obvious answer, but when you just want to be published because you think that's the touchdown for all those years of working - well, you get inclined to take any shot at the goalposts that you're offered.

Which is really stupid if you look at the big picture. (And why I have someone like Michele running interference for me, thank goodness!)

I think that I was so focused on finishing the book, just to prove I could, and then worked so hard and got so lucky landing a good agent that I sort of started coasting after that. The book was out of my hands and in Michele's so it was no longer my worry. I had done it - I had written a book and gotten a great agent at a reputable house. Why work hard on anything anymore?

So much for my literary vacation. (And I don't know what the heck I was thinking being this lazy, but that's what happened.)

I'm off to Alaska tonight to visit family for a week. I'll also be hitting the UAF library to copy some articles about the original bush pilots for a chapter or two about how aviation was crazy from the beginning up there. And I'll be working that 1,000 word a day schedule (and still keeping at Winter).

If the posting is slow it will be due to internet slowness, but I'll try to keep to a regular schedule.

Catch you on the flip side, from Two Rivers, AK.