Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Book Update #1

As many of you know, we plan on writing a book. Actually, we have two books that we want to write; the first one will be geared towards the law school crowd, while the second one will be for a much larger audience and has a lot more potential to make us relatively rich. But we want to do the law school book first, and so that’s what we’re focusing on.

Part of the reason we kept the blog going after we graduated was to keep our readers updated on the book process. I’m not quite sure what we expected to be happening; perhaps being jetted off to New York by big publishing houses trying to woo us with expensive Manhattan dinners and meetings with smart, urbane editors who share our vision. And while I still hold out hope that that happens, we are learning that the publishing industry moves as slowly as the obese guy in your class when he gets to the third flight of stairs. Basically, at this point, we have written a proposal, which our agent (who is fantastic, by the way) sent out to a handful of publishers. Depending on what happens with those publishers, she will keep sending it out until someone decides to make a very smart decision. And when someone does, we’ll let you know.

In a nutshell, our law school book is going to be an anti-guide; an insider’s look at law school written by the average law student, for the average law student. It’s going to be brutally honest, funny, and hopefully informative. It’s not going to paint law school in a negative light, per se; rather, it’s going to be the honest appraisal of two people who didn’t like law school and found that a lot of people shared their view.

This brings me to the point of this post. Today, our agent let us know that a publisher had passed on our proposal. This isn’t a big deal in and of itself, but what did strike me was the reason why. After explaining that our proposal was very funny, and that the book could do very well, the publisher said that she thinks the authors need to come from “big name schools” and that our schools lack name recognition (which isn’t really true; our schools lack ivy covered walls.) Essentially the publisher was saying, “If you had gone to Harvard, I’d publish this book.”

This logic pretty much flies in the face of why we want to write the book to begin with (other than money). All the law school books out there suck because they are written by top students from big name schools, and are about as useful to the average law student as an advanced English dictionary would be in the kitchen of your typical restaurant; only a few people can actually understand it, and even fewer actually get anything useful out of it. This blog, and hopefully our book, is meant for the proletariat of law students, whose numbers far outweigh the big school elite. For every kid at Harvard or Yale or any of the other handful of elite schools, there are hundreds of law students on the other side who have to do more than show up and graduate to get a plum job. So when it comes to name recognition, I have no doubt that our lack of “elitist” pedigree will speak to a much larger audience than some “insider’s” guide written by a guy from a school that most of us had no shot at.

But if it’s name recognition that they are looking for, then look for the book under our new pen names: Russell Hemingway and M.D. Salinger.