50 Shades of Book Virgin
“Here’s what keeps rattling in my brain: I can’t just call this a memoir. Yes, it’s my story — but it’s also so much more than that.”
If my manuscript got pulled over right now, the officer would look at me with that very specific combination of pity and disappointment and say, ma’am, step away from the vehicle.
Because I am an over-editor. It’s like a game of telephone where you start with the word alligator, it becomes elevator, then Darth Vader, and ten people later you land on skater. Legit completely different things.
Finishing the last chapter didn’t feel like some massive celebratory moment. It felt more like I could sing out loud the words to Lizzo’s “About Damn Time” and dance it out. When I read it back I thought to myself, this ending sucks a**, but it doesn’t — it’s just me overanalyzing things. Having revised and reworked my own story so many times I’m over it. Like have you ever gotten sick of looking at your own face? Yeah. It’s like that.
So. Manuscript: stepped away from. Officially.
And here’s where it gets good — shifting gears into business brain feels like a breath of fresh air. Like I get to step back into my ZOE. Zone of excellence. The place where your competencies drive the ship and you can just rally. Business I’ve done. I’m a booking virgin. Those are two very different things and I am only inexperienced with one of them.
Phase 4 is basically a business plan, a pitch, and a marketing strategy rolled into one. Which, if you know me at all, is a language I speak fluently.
Here’s what’s on the board:
A core positioning document — the book’s argument, its reader, its promise, all in one place. Think brand brief, except the brand is me and the product is something I wrote while crying in a car wash parking lot at least twice.
A pitch paragraph. One paragraph. Thirty seconds. The entire book distilled into something an agent reads between emails and either dog-ears or deletes.
Back cover copy — written to my girls, designed to make her pick it up and not put it back down.
A query letter. Which is, as far as I can tell, the publishing world’s version of a cold email to someone who has said no to ten thousand people before you walked in.
Then agent research. Which I know absolutely NOTHING about. Exactly how I felt about content marketing in 2019, and look how that turned out.
Here’s what keeps rattling in my brain: I can’t just call this a memoir. Yes, it’s my story — but it’s also so much more than that. And I have enough self-awareness to know I am not a BFD. I don’t have a household name. So why the hell would someone read my story?
Because it’s not just my story.
My vision writing this was almost a hybrid — a story meets the real world, here’s what happened, oh and by the way it can happen for you too. I usually read business and motivational nonfiction or swing the full thousand percent the other direction into a romance that would never happen in real life (50 Shades, anyone). This book lives somewhere in between. Which means it needs a category that doesn’t require me to be Oprah first.
Literary nonfiction. That’s where we live. Not spin — positioning. If you’ve ever written a value prop for something you believed in, you know the difference in your bones.
The agent and publisher are going to have opinions too. At some point I have to trust the work and put the pen down.
So. Challenge accepted. (said in my Barney Stinson voice).
MANUSCRIPT STATS
✅ 19/19 chapters edited. All of them. Done.
✅ 56,747 words. 137 pages. It’s a whole ass book.
🔄 Phase 4 underway: positioning doc → pitch paragraph → back cover copy → query letter → agent research
📚 Hello ZOE, goodbye booking virgin (well, working on it)
👀 Real talk: more edits will probably happen after an agent. But we’re not going there today.
