The Starting Pistol

I never set out to write a book. I always thought that I would, but it wasn’t a bucket list item or anything. I just enjoyed reading, and I enjoyed history. When I wrote the first paragraphs of The Football Prophecy: The Future of College Football, I just wanted to see where it would go. Several months later, what I learned was that writing a book was not the hardest thing to do if you had a fully formed idea in your head.

The Prophecy started like that. Well not exactly fully formed. It started with a lifetime of college football fandom, and a more recent fall down the rabbit hole of worldwide soccer. When I read the first soccer book on my Kindle and my Amazon account started leading me further and further into the history of the beautiful game, I was deep into tactics, culture, intrigue, and fandom by the time I came up for air.

When I stood on the sidelines of my son’s youth soccer game telling a great friend and writer the story of how college football and global soccer share a similar backstory and how the former should consider following the latter’s path out of its current chaos, he simply said: “that would make a great book.” That was all I needed to get my wheels turning. A few weeks later as I sipped coffee on the side of Destin Harbor watching the sun rise, I opened up my laptop and started typing.

Only a few months later I had a working manuscript. Now what? I slowly let people in on the fact that I had been writing a book… and, actually it was finished! I shared with my dad and he loved it! An exciting start, but he had to say that, right? I shared with my most prized mentor from journalism school. It didn’t suck! In fact, he was proud of my first effort and was kind enough to put his name on the cover attached to a nice blurb. Things were looking up.

I begin trying to understand the world of book publishing. Through friends and friends-of-friends I began to share the book with potential publishers. There was a little traction. An agent was willing to work with me. Another big time agent loved the book and the potential for multimedia, but his own firm passed. It turns out that sometimes you have to be a name first before you can get your ideas out into the bustling marketplace.

I decided to self publish after my ‘agent’ told me that the process for getting my story out there would be probably a year or two process. “What?!?” Many of the ideas in my book had a shelf life! College football could change tomorrow and the ideas in the book would be stale. The self-publishing route was the only way to get the ideas into the marketplace of ideas quickly.

… live typing