The waiting game with the publisher ended on Wednesday. Emphasis on THE publisher. My agent Miles emailed me on Monday to say that the 60 day "right of first refusal" window for Publisher A ended at midnight. The weird part was that it didn't end with either an offer or a refusal ... it just ended. Despite such a good initial response from the buyer at the publisher, they didn't come through with an offer. Miles gave them a friendly reminder that the window was closing, but even that didn't elicit a reply. Miles said he has never seen this before and he has worked with them for a while. He has seen them make offers or give polite "thanks, but no thanks" but he has never seen them let a window go by without one of those replies. He was pretty perplexed. He suspected something must be going on there behind the scenes and our book proposal is caught in it. Hmm... Well, at least I avoided a potential "it's not you, it's me" conversation with the publisher. So, to recap, it looks like my proposal was so bad it broke book publishing. OK, enough feeling bad. You know how the saying goes - when one door closes ... or doesn't close ... or stays slightly ajar ... or disappears ... another door opens. More accurately, several other doors open. One reason Miles was so eager to talk was that he wants to pitch the book to the handful of other big publishers. Despite the pocket veto from Publisher A, he is still quite excited about our proposal. In fact, my co-author who published a book through Miles a couple of years ago told me that Miles seemed a lot more excited by our book proposal than his first one that did get published. That was nice to hear. So we have a clear next step -- we shop our proposal around to the other handful of big publishers. Hopefully we get an offer, but at this point, I would be happy to at least get a ding ("no thanks" letter to let me know this is really happening. Because late August is exactly the worst time to shop a proposal, Miles said we wait until right after Labor Day, which is a great time. When I asked if we needed to rework the proposal in light of our first non-bite, Miles replied with a quick "no", which was a nice thing to hear to reaffirm that he still likes our chances. Stay tuned?