CONFESSIONS OF A BAR BOOK WHORE – And how you can become one too!

Updated: October 1, 2004

Author of Miss Charming’s Book of Bar Amusements, Miss Charming’s Book of Crazy Cocktails, Be a Star Magician, and The Everything Cocktail Party and Drinks Book.

Yep, it’s true, I’m a bar book whore. No one ever plans this lifestyle…it just happens. For me I guess it was bound to happen.

The nutshell version:
As most of you already know, I write bar books. I’ve tended bar for 24 years and have collected bar tricks, magic, riddles, and bets, that patrons have shared with me.

To date, I have 997 bar amusements on cocktail bev naps in my collection. It was almost 998 last week, but I decided not to count the biker bloak from England that stabbed five frilly toothpicks into his scalp, lit them and called himself a human birthday cake.

Anyway, when I was working at Disney World, my boss came up to me and told me that I should write a book about my collection of bar amusements. I thought about it for a year, and then took action. Now, my fourth book will hit the shelves next year.

People ask me all the time how I got published so this article is meant to save you some steps if you’d ever like to get a book published.

Understand that if you send anything directly to a publisher that it will be trashed. 99 percent of the time publishers go through agents because agents act as their filter system.

1. The best thing you can do is to go buy a book by Susan Page titled; The Shortest Distance between you and a Published Book. She explains how it all works. I followed her steps and within 2 years I was published. Yep, it took 2 years and 150 very nice rejection letters before I found an agent interested.

2. You must think about your market. Is it wide enough? Because publishers only think about how much money they can make, so the market must be wide

3. Agents and publishers will want to know what makes YOU the best person to write this book. Look at the author bios on books — they always say so-and-so has been doing so-n-so for more than twenty years blah blah blah.

4. Don’t think that you have to have an entire book written, That’s not the way it’s done these days. All you need is an idea and samples. Also, publishers LOVE “twists” on old ideas.

5. Once you sign a contract, they can take the direction of the book anyway they want. They design the cover, they decide the tone, and they decide everything. The only way you get to do it your way is to self-publish, but then you wouldn’t get national/international distribution.

Get this– I didn’t even know what the cover of my first book looked like until I saw it on Amazon.com.

6. And lastly, when you do get an agent or agency interested in your idea, make yourself easy to work with because they are use to pompous authors calling and cussing about… whatever.These days I don’t have to put myself out there because agencies contact me. That’s where the book whore part comes in. Whatever they want me to write, I do it. I just figure that the more books I have published the more doors will open for me in the future.