Questions About A Good and Perfect Gift Part 1

Last updated on: April 26, 2012 at 7:40 pm by Amy Julia Becker

Questions About A Good and Perfect Gift Part 1 2012-04-26T19:40:17-04:00 Amy Julia Becker

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Yesterday two packages arrived. The first was a small box with five “Advanced Reading Copies” of my upcoming book, A Good and Perfect Gift: Faith, Expectations and a Little Girl Named Penny. The second were the “galleys” for that book, which is to say the final final draft. I have seven days to comb through it for the very last time and send it back. By late August, the official copies will be available, but even as I write a hundred or so other copies are sitting in piles on the desks of various media-types, waiting to be read. And I hurry up and wait to hear what they have to say about it.

Part of my hurrying up and waiting is going to be writing about the book itself. Over the course of the next two months, I’m planning to offer a weekly reflection consisting of questions and answers about the writing process and the book itself. Once we get closer to the date of publication (“pub date”), I’ll add some fun promotional pieces as well. For now, I’m going to start with questions I’ve already been asked, but if you have questions about the writing process or the book, please comment below.

This week’s question: Did writing Penelope Ayers help you find a publisher for A Good and Perfect Gift?

Well, yes and no. Perhaps in a post for another day I’ll explain the process of self-publishing my first book, Penelope Ayers: A Memoir. Fast forward to me deciding not to try to find a traditional publisher for Penelope Ayers and self-publishing instead. It’s late 2009, over a year since Penelope Ayers has come out. I’ve written a proposal for A Good and Perfect Gift but there is no publisher in sight. In fact, the six editors who were interested in the book all declined to buy it, mostly because they didn’t believe it was marketable enough.

But then Andy Crouch read Penelope Ayers, and he happened to mention it as one of his “favorite cultural products” from 2009. A few weeks later, I found an email from an editor at Christianity Today asking if I’d like to contribute to her.meneutics, their women’s blog. I’m fairly certain the two events were connected to one another, although I never found out the details.

Then, a month or so later, two editors emailed me. “I came across your writing through her.meneutics and then started reading your blog. I’m wondering if you have any book ideas?”

Well, yes. In fact I did.

Within another two months I had a contract for A Good and Perfect Gift. So yes, writing Penelope Ayers led to writing A Good and Perfect Gift, but through a circuitous path that I never could have predicted.

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