I Want A Book Deal

All right, team. We need to put our collective heads together.

I've been spending more and more time lately doing it "library-style" at the local Borders. Although the air-conditioning is a plus, it has somewhat dawned on me that the types of books I read while at Borders are... shall we say... less than literary.

For example: when I'm at home, I'm reading through the collection of Narayan that S. left me. But when I go to Borders, I read Nora Ephron's I Feel Bad About My Neck.

It's not my fault; they always seem to put the crappiest books nearest the door, and I have a habit long since childhood of reading everything I see, and I see the pop-lit first.

But lately I've found myself leaving the store with a feeling similar to that of eating a Steak-n-Shake platter: to wit, that was a nice rush, but... ouch, my intestines.

(I feel bad about my intestines.)

Anyway. After spending a few weeks doing this I have come to the realization that there are people out there getting book deals for doing just about anything. Cameron Stratcher got a book deal because he decided he was going to have dinner with his kids. A. J. Jacobs got a book deal because he decided he wanted to read the Encyclopedia Britannica cover-to-cover. Tim Ferriss got a book deal because he knew that getting a book deal would generate passive income. Then he spent a week web-testing titles to see which one would induce the most people to buy copies.

(Sidebar/Holy Shit Alert: A. J. Jacobs was the original inspiration for Ferriss' "outsource my life to India" idea. See the essay here. No wonder the guy had time to read the encyclopedia.)

So I want a book deal too.

There seem to be a few ways of going about it:

1. Deciding to do something crazy/impossible/enviable and then writing about it. Coincidentally, the book deal itself will also help the thing get done. We all knew the One Red Paperclip guy was going to get a house, right from the beginning. There was no way he wouldn't.

Thus I should get a book deal for something titled "Bollywood Henna Mango Dance: How A Small Midwestern Girl Learned to Dance Alongside Bollywood's Hottest Superstars." Not only would I get the book advance, but I would also (by virtue of writing the book alone) get to dance alongside Bollywood's hottest superstars. Random House would work out the details.

2. Deciding to overhaul your life and then telling other people how to do the same. Thus we get things like Better Off (the book I read today), a story of a couple who move to Amish country and live for a year without technology. Or we get Ferriss' book.

There's a subgenre here, somewhat along the lines of "everything is better if you move to a magical foreign country." I was talking to S. about this last night, and he suggested this particular genre may have started with the bestselling Under the Tuscan Sun, which implied that Italian villas were there for the taking.

S. noted that the majority of these books (and their accompanying films) are set in nostalgia-inducing Old Europe, and that the market hadn't yet shifted over to freaky-sexy India. Although the new sensation Eat Pray Love might help push the trend (summary: white woman goes to ashram, finds self).

We discussed for a moment whether or not I should try to make a book of my Hyderabad experience ("Alice in Hyderabad: One Woman's Journey Into Directing Theatre, Loving India, And Finding Her Soul"). Unfortunately, it's probably ridiculously marketable (if only I had the right connections... hmmm....).

Then, however, we decided it would be equally worthwhile (and equally likely to bestsell) if I parodied/subverted the genre, writing a story not about a woman finding herself in a foreign land, but the reality of the smallness and simplicity of my trip (not to mention the heat and gastroenteritis).

S. suggested we call the book "Creative Bullshit in India."

It would probably sell. Books with an obscenity in their title tend to sell.

(Perhaps we could put a mango on the cover and have a worm crawling out.)

But seriously. How can I jump on the book-deal bandwagon while there's still time? And what should I write about? ^_^