Book Keeping: Six-Figure Advance for ‘Living the Story’
Rachel Kramer Bussel speaks with journalist Joe Miller about the life story of his book Cross-X: A Turbulent, Triumphant Season With an Inner-City Debate Squad, which was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in October 2006.
How did the book deal come about? Where in the process of covering them did you get the deal?
I started the project without a deal. I spent my own savings to travel with the team. Late in 2002/2003 season, I persuaded my editor to let me write a couple of stories about the team. The day the first installment ran, I got a call from an assistant at what was then known as Writers & Artists (now Paradigm). He asked if I’d considered optioning the story as a film. Uh, no. Of course I hadn’t. I’m just a hack from the Midwest. But, I told him, I am writing a book, and I need a literary agent. Well, it just so happened they’d signed on a literary agent a week earlier — a very good one named Lydia Wills. The assistant sent my stories to Lydia, and she decided to take on the project.
For the next six months, I wrote and rewrote and rewrote the proposal. It was by far the most difficult writing assignment I’d ever had. Basically, I had to get hundreds of pages and more than three years’ worth of material into a breezy essay. Tough!
She sent it out to nine trade publishers. Almost immediately, I was fielding phone interviews from editors. One week later I got a pre-empt from my top choice: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
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