Getting published. My path to a publishing contract.

A number of colleagues and friends have asked about my path to a publishing contract. Here is the story.

The short answer is that I was incredibly lucky. In a fairy tale sort of a way. I wrote a note on a Linkedin group one November evening that caught the eye of an acquisition editor who wrote back. Two calls, eight emails and ten months later I had signed a two book deal and shipped a 625 page text book to Palgrave Macmillan.

But that is not how it really happened. There is a back story. I have provided both. A short summarized edition as well as the "here is the story of my life, please don't go to sleep" version. Pick the one that works best for you.

Getting Published. The summarized edition.

1. Find a specialty. Master it by practicing, learning and teaching.
2. Get acknowledged as an expert in the field by at least a hundred practitioners.
3. Write and teach for two decade across multiple countries and regions.
4. Test your materials on unsuspecting students and audiences.
5. Self publish if you can and if you think it would be worthwhile.
6. Try all the cheapest (read: free) mediums for recognition and praise.
7. Build a documented platform with students, followers, fans, readers and customers.
8. Become an entertainer and substitute teaching with show business.
9. Shamelessly seek opportunities to self promote yourself and your ideas.
10. Invest in revised editions, new content, engaging materials for your teaching notes.
11. Be patient and wait to be discovered.
12. Don't expect to make your first million with your first contract or your first title.
13. In fact don't expect anything. Just keep on writing till you get hit by rheumatoid arthritis.

Getting Published. The bedtime edition.

January 1999.

"So why are you here, this January?".

We were all sitting together grabbing a quick bite at the cafeteria during a break in the orientation program for the J term. I am not sure if it was Christi Lowin or Elizabeth Khuse, but one of them asked me the question and off I went...

"I always wanted to do a play on Broadway, run the New York marathon and write a book. Columbia leases the cheapest two bedroom apartments on Riverside. It is the only way to do all three on a student budget".

I guess that afternoon in Uris Hall was the first time that I publicly admitted in front of perfect strangers that it would be nice to have a few million copies floating around with my name on them. Subject, context, topic, genre, I had no idea but that conversation was the beginning.

While New York and Columbia would have been a perfect launch pad for an aspiring writer, the only problem was inspiration. I had taken a start with a weekly column for Bottom line, the school's student newspaper but then used all of my creative quota to launch an online training startup, end of first term. While I was writing a few hundred pages every week, I didn't think they were worthy of an audience. Other than short notes and updates to my classmates in cluster X, the only prose I was producing was heading straight to our training pages, investor updates or to our business plan.

January 2003.

Fast forward four years. The startup is dead, the economy has tanked, New York is a distant memory and I am on the flight back home on Swissair with (finally) a story to tell. The problem now is convincing myself to write it. In Karachi there are interviews and a living that needs to be earned; school for our eldest and shipping containers filled with books that need to be cleared from customs. The little bandwidth left is consumed by filing taxes, exemptions and refunds.

The convincing bit takes three years and I end up with a two hundred page draft that represents everything but a book. The good news is that I have a table of content, a sample chapter and an outline that could be shared with an editor or an agent, whoever comes first.

Since this is 2006 and the internet is still young, the sum of collective wisdom and knowledge for a 35 year old can be found on Amazon.com. All you need is a master card. I buy everything I can find on writing a book proposal and finding an agent and closing that elusive book contract. The quest to put my name on a million hard copies of my story is on.

Like my book on the failed startup in Southern California, the quest for a publishing contract also botches up the happy ending. A few million emails and no responses later I figure out that the books on publishing don't tell the whole story. Just like the books on raising funding and starting up missed out on a few crucial details.

I am reliving the "everyone else in the world but you will find funding for your dream, dream", except this time the dream is a book on failure, the pitch is for a publishing contract and the audience is just as responsive to my petitions as they are to a cold call from an insurance salesman.

There are a few exceptions. Paul Brown at Publishing Confidential and Robert Ferrigno a NYT bestselling author. Both strike up a conversation with a fan in Karachi and suggest a few alternate ideas. Stephen King pens "On Writing" and the book becomes a permanent bedside companion.

Somewhere in 2006.

Luckily the same internet that gave us Amazon and online shipping, also created a market for e-books. Dazzled by the potential for self publishing and distributing it to millions of clamoring readers, I experiment with the new template. I rope in a few willing friends as editors. The loving wife does a read and shares a thumbs up. Parents and in-laws are not too disappointed. Friend don't run and hide in terror when I show up with a manuscript (the exception being Amir who promptly faints whenever I bring the topic of him reading my works). These are all encouraging signs and sufficient justification to risk a thousand dollars on a copy editor on elance. Kris promptly tears the book apart in a nice way and shows the way to sanity and something consumable by an audience broader than my immediate family.

Somewhere in 2006 the agony ends and the book is shipped to Ingram Micro for onward distribution on Amazon as an ebook. It breaks all personal records over the next two years for an ebook written by a living relative and sells, wait for it, one hundred electronic copies. At 7 dollars a pop, it is the most difficult seven hundred dollars I have ever made. The five years it took to write the book convert to an average income of one hundred and forty dollars a year.

Hmmm. Disappointing.

And that is before Amazon summarily terminates its ebook distribution agreement with Ingram, making my sole claim to fame as being the author of the three hundred and forty fifth millionth most popular title listed for sale on these hallowed shelves of learning, invalid.

Heartbreak Hotel, indeed.

In print, finally. 2009.

It's been eight years since the original New York conversation at the Business School cafeteria at Columbia. While the publishing world has been unforgiving and I have lost all touch with Christy and Elizabeth, the startup founded in Karachi is prospering. With the book and the upwardly mobile startup comes an opportunity to teach as an adjunct at an Indian management school in Dubai and Singapore.

After one of the classes in Singapore on a wet evening in December 2008 a student invites me to come see his office which is quite close to the campus on Alexandra and Depot. I find that my newest fan is a General Manager at the third largest printing press in Singapore. When he shows me his million dollar Mitsubishi and HP Digital printing presses I can't help but ask him the question that has been nagging me for all these years.

What would it take to do a print run for my ebook? Very little it seems since we have already done all the hard work. We complete the work on a second edition in record time and ship the electronic copy to Malick's team to typeset. Our first order for the book being placed by the Indian School I have teaching at for the last two years.

Three months later in March 2009, a package arrives from Singapore with twenty printed copies of Reboot. The quest to see my name in print has finally ended.

There is no rainbow and for some reason I can't find that promised pot of gold. But it feels nice and I can finally check off "go forth and write a book" of my list.

Book Two and beyond.

With a print connection in hand in Singapore, a captive audience of a few hundred students a year and teaching engagement in four cities across three countries, book two on risk management quickly comes about.

It took 7 years for Reboot, the 2nd edition, to see print. Risk Frameworks & Applications takes less than 12 months to cover the same ground. Within a year the first edition is followed by a second and the book becomes a regular feature in my Derivative Pricing and Risk Management courses on campus as well as at Treasury training workshops for banking customers.

Post book two, there is no longer a desire to pursue an agent, an editor or a publisher. India is a huge market right next doors and the volume represented by Indian customers is always an attraction. But without a connection it remains a wishful dream.

Then we quickly discover all the issues with shipping and logistics. It is one thing to run a print on demand model sitting in North America. It's another emulating it based in Karachi with your primary print facility in the Far East. Try making a margin after subtracting postage costs of lots of twenty copies dispatched from Singapore to New York, Virginia & Louisville Kentucky. After selling a few more print copies at cost and below, I start exploring digital options.

The lucky break. November 2012.

Our online risk training courses story has been told many a times. Here are a few points that you should remember from that tale.

a) First if you own the content and also distribute it, if you have the platform and the following to make it work, the numbers add up quite quickly. Much faster than the traditional conventional model. Meyers and Zack' original MIT paper on the design of information product is now available for free. Go ahead and read it. First published in 1996 it was the inspiration of my first startup. 17 years later it still remains relevant for the information architecture and design industry.

b) You should not be reliant on just your platform or the platform of your publisher. Ideally the best approach is to use the two platforms to feed and supplement each other. This require careful thinking, some experimentation but very clear expectations.

In the end It was a post to promote the digital platform on Linkedin that got us noticed and lead to the elusive publishing conversation.

To some extent it was the already established platform as a business as well as an adjunct instructor, the tested content, and the specialist status that made the book proposal attractive to the other side. In three years we had already written a thousand pages on the topic in question (risk management). Extracting a 600 page text book out of these pages took a little time but was not as difficult as starting off with a clean slate. The platform was already attracting hundred and fifty thousand visitors in the digital world when we started. With the book in print the numbers would only grow larger.

From a pure monetary point of view the first offer to you as an author never makes rationale sense. Having traveled two decades to reach this goal, money stops being the primary motivator. The first book is a door opener, a solution for the credibility conundrum. It is only when you have moved successfully beyond it that you can book bigger bets.

By writing two thousand words about my publishing experience I have neither become an expert nor qualify as a guide. Each discovered author has his own story. A friend asked me to enumerate it and I did. I hope you find it useful.

There were two questions that always nagged me when I first started on this path. "Will they read what I write and like it?" and "When so many have failed, how do I know that I will be able to succeed?". Later in the year of the cafeteria conversation at Columbia two professors that changed my life answered the questions for me. I think their answer is still applicable a decade and change later.

Ralph Biggadike and John Whitney, said the same thing in Uris Hall, two evenings apart in the spring of 2000.

There is only one way to find out. Why not?

From: My road to a publishing contract.