The tears came without warning the next morning while alone in my car. I wasn’t sobbing and my expression was somewhere between a grin and disbelief, but tears were trickling down my cheeks.

Only on television did people quit their jobs because they felt unfulfilled as an artist and have it actually work out.

Most people who walk away from paying gigs to become singers, artists or, in my case, writers, end up penniless and begging for their old job back after learning that they weren’t quite as good as they thought.

Eighteen hours or so before, my writing partner Jason and I had sat in a meeting with a publishing company interested in our book proposal.

We’d been in this position before and have had fawning executives tell us how great our idea was on one hand, while never calling us again on the other.

And, while unlike most authors, we have actually had a book published by a major publisher, we have also had our share of stinging rejection.

Mostly, though, the rejections were of the subtle, “Hey, how come that girl tells me how much she wants to get together whenever we bump into each other, but she never returns my calls?” variety.

Book publishing works too slowly for the pain to be acute because usually, by the time you actually get told no, you have given up hope of being told anything.

The constant waiting for bad news had led me away from hopes of publishing another book, but a desire to write something long-form and have it actually have a chance of being read led me back to the process once more.

This time, though, Jason and I set simple rules.

We would only work with people who actually wanted to work with us.

We’re not new at this so we didn’t want promises of Oprah bookings or massive promotional campaigns.

We wanted an editor who believed in the project at a company that would design a nice- looking book, get it into stores and be supportive of our efforts to get people to buy it.
Modest goals perhaps, but very few prospective authors – even those with good ideas – ever sell a book, let alone sell one to someone they want to work with.

Perhaps, that’s why when faced with the astounding fact that three companies wanted our book, we took the smallest offer.

The difference was in a simple sentence in an e-mail where our possible future editor, asked “if we would come to New York so she could pitch us.”

The upfront money was small she explained, but she loved our idea and her company “got behind” each of its projects and worked hard to design nice- looking books.

Frankly, she had us the moment she returned my e-mail taking her up on the offer of pitching us a few minutes later.

The time spent a few days later around a makeshift conference table where she showed us other books in the line and we compared promotion ideas, just validated that we’d found not just someone willing to publish our book, but the right people to do it.

I never expect to make a living from writing books (freelance public relations and editing have taken care of that).

And even though I quit a job I loved to do it, I was never confident that I would ever sell this particular project.

That’s why it’s hard to stop crying as I type this and harder still to resist the urge to throw my arms in the air and scream at the top of my lungs. “Worst Ideas Ever” by Daniel B. Kline and Jason Tomaszewski spring 2011 in bookstores everywhere.

Daniel B. Kline’s work appears in more than 100 papers weekly.
He can be reached at dan@notastep.com or you can see his archive at dbkline.com.
See new content daily at WorstIdeasEver.com and follow Kline on Twitter at @WorstIdeas.