I just got off a conference call with a Senior Editor at the publisher we submitted the proposal to. In keeping with the Sideways movie theme, I will call her Maya. While nothing definitive came out of the call, it does sound like she is interested in pursuing it further. Maya started the conversation by saying she "greatly enjoyed" reading our proposal. Then she asked a bunch of questions about how we came up with it, how long it would take us to write, and how we would help push sales. Interestingly, she didn't have any big suggestions for changes. She did ask us how wedded we are to the working title and we went back and forth on that a bit. After about 40 minutes, Maya wound up the conversation with two things that I take as a nice sign. First, she said the proposal passed the "is the content worthy and is the message fresh?" test she uses to review proposals. (Nice to hear, nice to hear.) And second, she asked us to get her one additional piece of information ... by Friday. (Very nice to hear. Very nice to hear.) I really like the fact that she had a quick deadline, which suggests she has some specific next steps in mind. So all in all, my first conversation with a real live publisher has me smiling. We didn't leave with any definitive next steps or timing, but it seems like we just got over another hurdle. Stay tuned.