Sarah Demystified

I signed my first book contract when I was 24 years old.

I immediately found out that when you sign on with a major publisher, it doesn’t matter how old you are, everyone writing a book within 2,000 miles of your house begins to imagine you are the key to them getting a book deal.

(My favorite example occurred at a conference when a church leader cornered me in the lunch line and pitched me a novel about Christian aliens who land at an amusement park.)

(No lie.)

In any case, it was then, nine long years ago, that I first started fielding the question that some aspiring writers popped on me no less than a dozen times this weekend at Dream Year DC—

How do you break into publishing?

Since time between our weekend sessions was crunched, I fired off the 30-second version and punted their follow up questions until after the event. As promised, here’s the story in all its outlined glory.

The Myth – the “Out of the Blue” Email

My good friend, Ben, the founder of Dream Year, talks a lot about “demystifying dreams”.

Here’s what he means by that: Dreams tend to get glossed over into “big break stories” that sound like mythology. When we portray our journeys as “miracles” of sorts, it can feel isolating to the listener because the story doesn’t offer any practical learning.

The mythological answer to how I broke into publishing, for example, is this: One day, after reading an article I’d written on the web, one of the world’s largest publishers emailed me out of nowhere and asked me to put together a book proposal. I was 24 years old.

When I say the publisher emailed me “Out of the Blue”, I mean it. I didn’t know anyone at the publisher. I had no idea they would email me. It was completely unexpected. Fell. into. my. lap.

In most parts of the industry, 98% of books are acquired through agents…which makes my story one.in.a.million.

But that version of the story doesn’t offer anyone any guidance, right? It just sends them begging God to send a publisher to read their blog.

What would really help is if I stripped away the romanticized Hallmark-channel story of “how my dreams came true” and relayed the practical, repeatable steps that might help you  achieve your goal. (Keep reading…)

The Demystified Version – Building Influence

I took my first stabs at writing books and articles almost as soon as I learned to hold a blue Bic pen in my then chubby little hand.

(Literally)

• Thanks to my mom’s persistence with train-shaped phonics flashcards, I became an uber early reader. To capitalize on this, my dad helped me make “Golden Book” spin-offs, carefully gluing flattened tinfoil spines down the cardboard covers of the books I designed with my Crayola 64 pack.
• In the toy department, my brothers lobbied for games for their hand held video game systems (Game Boys at the time). I, already the junior super nerd at age eight, advocated  for 19 cent spiral notebooks which I quickly filled front to back with fiction stories about a ten year old protagonist named “Big Step”.
• (Note: I still have them but will burn them to unrecognizable ashes before I die.)
• My first short term summer work involved filing photographs and writing occasional freelance pieces for a smaller-than-small-town local newspaper. My pint sized “big” break there fell when I uncovered a story about  the front end of an empty car that caught on fire for like sixty seconds before a nearby firetruck extinguished it.
• (The devastating low point of this career stretch occurred when I misspelled the name of a little league player.)
• By the time I was 17, I’d snagged a spot writing for a quarterly teenage tabloid called Generation Next and scored a front page cover story in the county’s biggest newspaper, the Monroe Evening News.
• Fast forward to when I was working my way through college and you’d find me pitching myself as a free lance writer for several national magazines with teen and young adult readership. One of my articles was about dorm room eating habits and was entitled something prestigious like, How to Care For Your Refrigerator. I also managed to get one of two eventual little excerpts plopped into Reader’s Digest.
• It was a start.
• Over the next few years in my first job on staff at an artistic, forward-thinking local church, I periodically pitched articles about reaching “all people” to denominational magazines. Oddly enough, I was never a member of any of these denominations, mind you. I just learned how to capitalize on any ties that I had (that I graduated from a Free Methodist College, for example).
• Also during this time as a church staffer, I got to be part of a fast-growing church subculture–the kind that is connected to places like Leadership Network and Catalyst–where I got to participate in hosting and being part of panels at various events.
• After I resigned from that position, there was a few month stretch where I felt like I had very little opportunity in comparison to my previous post. No budget. No immediate job offer.  So I decided to do the only thing I could do–I started a website to offer resources about  reaching communities.
• It was NOT a blog. It was an organizational website. And it was called Portal Ministries (Bleacherseats.org also forwarded there). I picked the name Portal because the word sounded like a gateway to the future and was simultaneously an ancient word used to describe the porch and surrounding areas outside some of the world’s most prominent ancient churches.
• After asking an accountant friend for some cheap advice, I launched a non-profit, filing as a 501c3, and appointing myself the Executive Director. I made myself available to come alongside local churches trying to reach marginalized people groups in their communities, and, I began contacting organizations asking them for books and products to review and source my articles.
• When I wrote those organizations, I didn’t write them in bubble cursive as a skinny  24-year old idealist named “Sarah”. I typed them letters on letterhead and signed off as the Executive Director of Portal Ministries.
• It worked. Every. Time. No one ever told me no. I was 100 for 100.
• One of the articles I wrote was about depression in the church. And one of the sources I interviewed was a writer named Ben Devries who wrote a book about his experience with depression growing up as a Missionary Kid. It was called A Delicate Fade.
• After reading the article, Ben emailed his editors a link – telling them to check it out.
• And it was then, and only then, that the Myth of the “Out of the Blue” email from Zondervan showed up in my inbox, asking if I’d be interested in writing a book.
• When I sent out my first book to get endorsements, I sent one to Ryan Dobson–son of James Dobson. His agent, Wes Yoder, intercepted the book and called me on the phone that same week. Having been an elder in the church, he had been particularly moved by the apology chapter of Dear Church and wanted to help me organize a national speaking tour.
• Together the book deal and speaking tour opened the communication lines for me to pitch articles to a whole new caliber of magazines and newspapers. And periodically, to this day, I still do freelance or contract work, or sometimes I contribute to books, in order to maintain my voice within the faith & spirituality genre.

The Demystified Version is the better version to tell the aspiring writer, don’t you think? Because it tells a story worth learning from–that you can start small, persist in faith, and gradually grow your platform until your work can speak for itself.

Those are the tips I pass onto writers when I teach writers’ workshops or when I help friends develop their book proposals.

With all that said, I am a firm believer that if I help others advance, then more good is accomplished than I could ever accomplish alone. So if you’d like me to give you some materials to help you on your way with your budding book proposal, just drop me a line at sarahraymondcunningham [at] gmail [dot] com.

Happy Writing!!