The Writing of Loon: A Marine Story - Part 5

This is the last of a 5 part repost.

When I returned home from Hong Kong, the contract was waiting. The details were numbingly legal, but the bas

I was only disappointed to hear that the publication date had been set for May 19, 2009 - well over a year away. RH sought to position Loon as a beach book, a summer read. They also wanted to be certain that it didn't get caught up in the media hysteria surrounding the Presidential election.

I was assigned an executive at Random House who was to shepherd Loon from manuscript to publication. The book now belonged to them, so the first time I had someone else on my team with a financial stake in the book's success. 

This was business. 

I understood business.

What were the next steps? 

• Final editing. There were several minor areas that RH felt could be developed - a paragraph here, a chapter ending there. These were only suggestions, but they were right on every point. The changes were made.
• Permissions. This required that I have written permission from anyone that I had quoted, cited, or mentioned in a potentially libelous way ("Would Sal Martucci, or his family see your humor in watching him get shot for venereal disease?") Several of these permissions required that I personally pay a royalty to the author (Lou Reed Music, for example.)
• Cover design. I had always seen Loon as a coming of age story with broad age and gender appeal. Then again, it is a war story. How do we walk the line to create the cover we want that will be appealing to the broad segment of the market. I found the result to be incredible!
• Copyediting. I had presented what I felt was a near perfect manuscript. What came back were pages of penciled scribble in a language akin to Navajo. The (suggested) corrections were editorial, grammatical, and contextual. Remember how in school you'd turn in a paper with perhaps a couple of soft points that you thought might skate by??!! Nothing missed the copyeditor.

Now, with three months to go before publication, I've been assigned a publicist who has a PhD in English and enough experience to position the book well in the media. At every turn, I have been amazed by professionalism of all with whom I have dealt. Now we again need your help.

We are beginning to plan a book tour, media events, and the like to assure a positive launch on May 19.

So many of you have been supportive of this effort. Thanks to your pre-order purchases, Loon is #219,116 on the Amazon best seller list (A Tale of Two Cities is 604,437). We’ve been as high as 89,000 and as low as over a million. (Editor's note - Loon has risen as high as 2,300 on Amazon and currently sits at 12,300.)

I am confident that Loon will be a #1 best seller. The grand young sons of Charlie Company have earned nothing less.

Please let me know of potential book signing venues (including your house,) media and literary that may be good targets for a favorable review.

Thank you for your support.

Thank you for visiting.

Semper Fidelis.