by Sara Reiss

Last year, while I was finishing up my senior year at NYU, my English major boyfriend, Geoff Klock, deferred his acceptance to the Ph.D. program at UT to wait for me. During this waiting period, he decided to go ahead and write his doctoral dissertation on superhero comics in order to save us time and money. By February, he had a working draft that was complete enough to for him to read it at a conference in March. It was upon his return from this conference that he announced his decision to publish the dissertation as a book. Now, I have come from the school of thought that publishing a book is not an easy task. It's not something that you just announce that you are going to do; but that's Geoff. So I smiled and decided to support him in his decision.

The very next day he went out to Barnes and Noble to look for books on how to publish and returned with only one guide: Getting Your Book Published for Dummies. One guide? And of all of the guides out there, this one? Surely he couldn't believe that it was going to be this simple.

But over the next few weeks, he (and I) read through the first chapters of the Dummies book, which advised us to compile a list of possible publishers and editors in order to write letters of query (see chapter 7 of the Dummies book). Of course, Geoff chose the easiest way possible to accomplish these tasks. First, he searched his bookshelf for books similar to the one that he was proposing and came up with a list of possible publishers. Then he went online, looked up names of specific editors from each publisher's home page and began writing his letters. By the end of that week, they were sent. I thought this was ridiculous. Shouldn't he go out and pound the pavement or at the very least, stop by the library and do a little more homework?

Expecting a long wait for responses, I prepared to console and encourage. But within two weeks after his mass mailing, he received a positive response from a reputable publisher in New York. No, it wasn't Penguin; but it wasn't Joe's Publishing Shack either. Geoff sent them his book proposal (See chapter 8 of the Dummies book: "Preparing Submission Materials That Sell"), and by May, he was sitting in the editor's office. A very pleasant, slightly crazed and terribly enthusiastic transplant from England, the editor explained that they had just published a similar book on superheros that had been fairly well received; therefore, he was positive it would be publishable if Geoff made some necessary edits.

By then, Geoff had almost forgotten about the Dummies book and skipped right over chapters 10-13: "Choosing a Publisher," "Choosing an Agent" and "Self-Publishing," to the middle of chapter 14: "Negotiation." And it wasn't even June! Were things ever going to get tough?

In late June, he got the email. It simply stated that THE BOOK was going to be published and to expect a contract in the mail. Geoff had done it! And all he had needed was a little help from a book for Dummies.

And now the confession: I have since discovered that Geoff's meteoric rise to publishing was a fortunate coincidence. He owes a lot to luck. As it turns out, his editor was in a honeymoon period with the publishing company, having just transferred to the New York office from London. He was granted a certain amount of newcomer's creative license, and Geoff, the Dummie turned Super Biblio-Hero, was granted his first book.

[A painter and graphic designer, Sara Reiss is a recent transplant from New York who paints sets for the Zachary Scott Theatre when she's not playing video games with Geoff.]