Movement History Project Update

I just added one of my infrequent updates to the web site for the social movement history project that is my main focus these days:

Chapter 6 is written, minus two passages that will require a few days of research that I cannot do in Sudbury. I'll see if I can do that down in Toronto in November. In the meantime, I've moved on to Chapter 7, which should be a fairly quick one to write, and hopefully I'll get Chapter 9 done as well before the end of the year, or close to it. In terms of the search for a publisher, neither of the two agents who had requested a full proposal in the last round of queries were able to take me on. One had serious health issues that mean he will not be doing anything professionally for some time, and the other sent me a very complimentary and supportive "no" -- not sure if that's just SOP, but it was still nice to receive. The next step is to return to approaching publishers directly, which is really a more appropriate strategy for a book of this type. I had thought that I would go back to doing it one publisher at a time, but a response to my last email update from a supportive reader with much more experience in these matters than myself made the point that it makes more sense to do them in parallel rather than in series just because of how long publishers take to respond to such things. Most relevant publishers in Canada accept simultaneous submissions, so this morning I sent off a bunch of query letters. There also appear to be two very relevant publishers that do not require a query first and just want proposals, so when I get the first request back from these queries for a full proposal, I'll print out three copies and submit to those other two as well. I think I may want to tinker a bit more with the proposal, too, and shorten it if I can...we'll see.