How to Get a Book Deal | Aimee Molloy | TEDxPiscataquaRiver

in the last ten years I've written five books one of these has been my own and the other four I've co-authored which means that if you're somebody who has a story to tell but you're not a writer you may hire me to get inside your head and work with you and help you write your book throughout my career I've been approached many times by people who when they hear what I do tell me that they've always wanted to write a book of their own that they have a memoir or a novel that they're kind of just waiting to tell and so the question comes how do you get a book deal you know how does something like that happen what seminar do I need to sign up for or what classes do I need to take or who do I need to know and my answer to this is I'm sure all of those things are really helpful and can be important but I don't think they're what really matter in the end now for me personally I've never taken a writing course I don't have a fancy writing degree and at the time that I sent my first book contract I had written one very short and very boring article in a local New York City magazine but what I did have was a willingness to be something we're told we should never be totally and completely unreasonable now as somebody who's made a career out of telling other people's stories I'm not that accustomed to telling my own but that's what I'm gonna do here today my story of unreason began in September 2003 when I read a very short article in The New York Times about the arrest of a man in jamesy jamesy he was a captain in the United States Army and what was one of the first Muslim chaplains in the military at the time of his arrest he was serving at Guantanamo which had just recently began operating as a detention center for al Qaeda and Taliban fighters captured after 9/11 the the story that I read was was really disturbing it said that James II who had graduated from West Point was being charged with espionage spying and possibly treason because apparently at some point during the ten months that he served at Guantanamo he had decided to switch sides and he had begun to collude with the detainees the more I read the more disturbing the story became first I read that when the when he was actually charged it it wasn't with espionage with treason instead it was with mishandling classified documents a far less serious crime but then that story changed those charges were dropped and instead he was charged with two crimes committing adultery and downloading pornography which believe it or not are considered illegal the United States military though as you might imagine are rarely enforced but then those charges were dropped his record was wiped clean and a several months after his arrest he was honorably discharged from the Army now what I didn't read after this was the story that I wanted to read the story that called into question what had happened that looked at the incongruity here you know that asked how could it be that Captain United States Army who happened to be Muslim went from being considered part of the one of the most important spy rings in US history to being honorably discharged from the Army I mean somebody had to write that story right it was unreasonable to think that that might be me at the time that I read this I was not a writer I mean I was a writer in the sense that I wrote but it was mostly for myself because despite the fact that being a writer was what I wanted to be more than anything I had accepted it wasn't gonna happen for me because I had been told it wasn't gonna happen for me through the years I'd written stories to magazines and newspapers and said you know I'd love to look for you to publish this and most of the time I never got a response and the editors who were played enough to write me back always wrote me back to say no and so I had accepted this that I had decided it wasn't happening and with my stack of rejection letters I instead went on to get a very practical degree and a really practical job which I was working when I first read this article about James II which is why I can only describe is what I did afterwards is totally and completely unreasonable but I found the phone number of his parents who lived about an hour outside of New York where I live and I called them up and I asked them if I could come over and have coffee of course they wanted to know who I wrote for before agreeing to an interview and so I just told them the truth I write for myself the next day I sat at their kitchen table and they showed me an evaluation that their son had received during his time at Guantanamo it said that he was a tremendous asset to the mission there it said that his commitment and loyalty to the work at Guantanamo was unquestionable it said that he should be promoted up the first possible opportunity it was the best evaluation he had ever received during his time his entire career in the military and it was a shoot two days before he was arrested for allegedly being part of all Qaeda mm-hm this was enough to convince me that there was a bigger story here and so I put aside every reasonable thought I had and I tried to bury as much self-doubt as I could and I decided that yeah maybe I was gonna be the one to tell this story it was unreasonable to think that I would get jay-z's high-powered military attorney to allow me a self-described journalist who had zero published articles to come to DC and comb through boxes of court documents but he said yes it was unreasonable to think that when I called Jamie's friends and his colleagues and his old bosses and people who work with McDonough Moe that they would talk to me but they didn't now eventually I knew if I was gonna write the story it would be nice if somebody would agree to publish it so once again unreasonably I went back to the magazines but this time I went for it I sent letters off to the New Yorker and the Atlantic and Vanity Fair it was an editor from Esquire who invited me in to talk and a couple days later he called with an offer they wanted to do a big story on James II but there were two conditions one I had to get him to agree to an interview and two they weren't gonna let me write it we're signing the piece out the editor said to who I asked to a real writer he said but you can help I said okay jamesy however did not despite all of the email messages I said him and the millions of voicemails that I left he never responded to me once so when I went back to Esquire and told him it didn't look like James II was gonna cooperate they told me that the story was dead so unreasonably I went back to more magazines and this time the New Republic said yes they wanted to publish the piece and this time they weren't even going to give it to a real writer they were gonna give it to me they were gonna trust it even though I had no experience writing anything big like this for a national publication that I knew how to do that this it turned out was actually unreasonable because I totally screwed it up during the fact-checking process they discovered that I made two incredibly careless errors like getting his aide wrong of course I tried to congratulate them and their incredible fact-checking skills but I sort of had an idea what was coming we've lost faith in you the editor said we're killing the piece so I think at this point it was pretty clear what the reasonable thing to do was the reasonable thing was to pay attention to the message that the universe was telling me and to return to my practical job and my practical life and to give this up right the next day I walked into my boss's office and I quit when people asked me what I was gonna do I said I didn't know but I didn't know I was gonna get a waitressing job to pay my bills and I was gonna try and somehow figure out how to turn all these yeses into those mm-hm the last thing my job was super weird I was spent the day going back and forth between feeling totally exuberant and absolutely terrified and as I left work that day and got on the subway to return to my apartment in Brooklyn I was thinking about what people had said to me it wasn't just unreasonable what I had done to make this decision it was it was risky it was irrational I got out of the subway thinking you know it was actually this was foolish so I was thinking about this walking towards my apartment and then my phone rang I didn't recognize the number but I answered it anyway it was James II calling I sold my story he said it's gonna be a book and I want you to write it it wasn't reasonable to think that that was really happening but a couple days later there I was in the offices of a new of a big New York City book publisher they were completely on to me why should we let you write this book he said I don't know if you should I said do you know how to write a book he said I do not I said do you know how many real writers would kill to write this book I sure do I said well then why does James even want you to write this book and so I told him what I knew what I had discovered during these unreasonable months of digging I knew more about what happened to James even he knew himself none of the allegations about him were ever true he didn't commit espionage he wasn't spying he never even handled his classified documents he came under suspicion for knowing too much about Islam even though knowing about Islam was what he was there to do he came under suspicion because he was known to pray five times a day and sometimes together with other Muslim personnel and pray with them he came under suspicion because he was known to talk to some of his superiors about his belief that the detainees there weren't being treated fairly and that it was going against the mission to mistreat their Koreans he came under suspicion because two years after September 11th he was surrounded by a handful of people who didn't believe that you could be a Muslim and not be a terrorist a couple weeks later I was on my way to Guantanamo with a signed book deal and the chance to do some real research in 2005 forgotten country came out and it was heralded as one of the first inside looks into what was really happening at Guantanamo and then surprisingly the US has started to come a year after that I worked with Elizabeth Edwards and her first memoir about breast cancer and her husband's run for the presidency a year after that I worked with John Kerry than just a senator and his wife Teresa Heinz Kerry on their on a book about some of the most pressing environmental issues facing the nation today then I was in Ghana in West Africa looking at the slave trade that exists there anywhere children are sold by their parents and then to Senegal where I wrote however long the night about what I think is one of the most interesting human rights movements alive today a movement to end the practice of female genital cutting last year as Nicole said rosewater came out written written and directed by Jon Stewart and based on them on the memoir by Maziar Bahari which I helped her right now I'm never argued that I've had the most successful career or that I'm anywhere near the most talented writer but I have had a very rich career and I am doing exactly what I've always wanted to do and I know that none of that would be possible if it weren't for that first unreasonable irrational decision to take the risk and to go for it and I also know this every single person that I've worked with all these people that I've that I've had the chance to write write with and write about they've all shared the same thing this deep sense of unreason of being told no again and again and going forward any way of knowing that there is a rational practical and logical route to take and going in the exact opposite direction like pam cope with whom I wrote Jansen's gift in 2006 Pam saw this picture in the front page of the New York Times about this boy named Mark mark lives in Ghana he's six years old and he was a slave Pam read about how his parents had sold them for sixty six dollars to a man who worked as a fisherman and how mark worked alongside him seven days a week for 12 hours a day she read about how he was often beaten by this man that he called master and about how the best thing that he could hope for was to grow up and buy some child slaves himself it was super unreasonable to think that Pam was gonna do anything about this kid right I mean she's a mother of four in Neosho Missouri and mark is a six year old slave in a very remote village in West Africa when Pam started to tell her friends that she was thinking that she wanted to figure out a way to help mark they weren't shy about telling her and reasonable that sounded you're a mother of four in Neosho Missouri he's a six year old slave in Ghana you don't have a master's degree in child slavery you don't even know where Ghana is on the map and she didn't and not only that she was deeply grieving the very unexpected death of her teenage son who died of an undiagnosed heart ailment nobody would have thought it was unreasonable if Pam hadn't never left her couch after that and now help this kid who lived in Ghana nine weeks after reading this Pam got on a plane to Ghana and she pulled Marc off the lake she found a boarding school to take him in she raised the money to pay his way not only that she saved six other kids with them including two of his siblings and then a couple months later she saved some more kids and then some more to date she saved over a hundred kids from slavery and through the foundation that she started she's built a permanent care facility for 50 kids who otherwise would have nowhere else to live so this was the picture of Mark when she saw him this is Mark today no this is where he saw and I would argue that she is by far the most unreasonable woman that I've ever met she lives in a village called anger inna Bambara in senegal and since the time it's used old enough to work she has been the cutter this means that she travels from village to village performing the ritual of female genital cutting this is a very revered and honored position in her culture it was passed down to her from generations of women in her family like the women her grandparents heard her grandmother's and all her grandmother their grandmothers before them where he has cut thousands of girls but then she went to school through a program called toast on and she learned about the health impacts of FGM see she learned that the hemorrhaging and infection and sometimes even the death that came afterwards were not the result of bad luck or evil spirits as she had been taught but because of being cut from an unsterile of knife and she learned that she yes she even though she is just a woman has the right to question any practice that might bring her it was unreasonable to think that worry would question the practice of FGM see this is this ritual is the most important moment in a girl's life and it has been around literally for centuries it was unreasonable to think that where he was gonna go gonna go home to her mother and tell her that she was never gonna cut another girl and not only that she was gonna talk to all the women in her village and she was gonna start a serious dialogue about this practice she was gonna raise the question that yes this is a part of our culture but is it one that we should continue that's not the reasonable that's crazy that she would do that but in 1997 the women of anger in Ybarra became among the first African women to stand up and publicly declare an end to the practice of female genital cutting where he didn't stop there though instead she started to walk she spent days and then weeks then months walking from village to village talking to her relatives and all the people surrounding her about what she had learned about what her village had done eventually she was joined by others by women and by other men and because of her because of her unreasonableness and then reasonableness of legions of women and men like her more than 7,200 communities have now declared an end to the practice of female genital cutting and Senegal mm-hmm and now in Djibouti and in Guinea and Guinea Bissau and now in Mali and Mauritania and the Gambia and even Somalia so to return to my original question what do you need to do to get a book deal or to become a Human Rights Crusader or the Secretary of State or to finally open that business or to teach someone something or to create an Art Center what do you need to do to leave the most impactful life I don't know what do you think

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 47,181

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Global Issues, Activism, Revolution, Writing

Id: N6AX81YvGC0

Length: 17min 47sec (1067 seconds)

Published: Fri May 15 2015