After my first two publishing disasters, I was in no hurry to publish a third book, but it remained a longer-term goal. In the meantime, I worked on “building my platform” and refining my humor writing skills, taking them as uproariously high as possible. (I don't know why, but I fantasized about one day having a reviewer call my work “trenchant.”) I had already been sending out twice-monthly humor columns, called “Off My Noodle,” to email subscribers for a few years, which were also posted on my web site, www.judygruen.com. While no one was paying for the subscription, I rarely missed my self-imposed deadlines. I tried to sell the columns afterward, but I have weaned myself off that habit: now I only write original material for my regular paying gigs, and then adapt the columns for my email subscribers. After all, my editors want original material, not “reprints.”

After a few years, I had amassed enough Noodles (high-humor, zero carbs!) to fill another book, even after weeding out the weaker or dated material. But if selling humor is a hard sell, selling a collection of humor columns is doubly so, since I was not David Sedaris or Dave Barry. I briefly thought of changing my name to “Dave,” but feared it would confuse my friends and family. Yet I knew I would buck the odds again. True, I had shown appalling taste in publishers so far, but my persistence created undeniable momentum in my career: My first two books had won awards from the publishing industry, I still had the bragging rights over the other PR and sales successes, which I had achieved on my own. I also had begun speaking on occasion—something I knew I needed to develop as a tool to drive book sales. I was selling my work consistently to a variety of media outlets.

With hope triumphing over experience (again), I spent months re-editing the columns I chose for the book, organizing them into themed sections. It was a point of pride with me that I did not just toss everything together that I had ever sent out and slap it between two covers. This collection of what I considered my “best of, so far” became The Women's Daily Irony Supplement (which earned the Gold Award from ForeWord Magazine in the humor category for 2007).

I found an agent who loved the manuscript and shopped it around for many months, starting at the top of the publishing food chain. The reactions fell into three categories: I was very funny but my platform wasn't big enough, my platform was great but I wasn't that funny, or they already had another woman humorist in their list. After more than a dozen rejections we had to conclude that I was again looking at very small indie houses or self-publishing. I appreciated my agent's hard work, and we parted on good terms.

I took several more months before deciding what to do, because I figured if I made a third stupid mistake I'd have to kill myself, and if I did that, who would take the kids to the orthodontist? (Either that, or I could write a little memoir called, Smart Women, Foolish Publishing Choices. But who would publish that?) I emphatically did not want to go POD, yet it seemed like my only option. I settled on one POD company whose references checked out, but I still felt that POD still had too many strikes against it, and couldn't bring myself to sign the contract. One day, almost in desperation, I picked up a magazine from a consortium of indie publishers that had been collecting dust on my desk for weeks. I called the organization and asked if they could think of any member publishers who might take an interest in me. They suggested I contact Beagle Bay Books, and since I had nothing to lose, and my dog is half-beagle, I sent them an email. Jacqueline Simonds wrote back right away, which made me momentarily suspicious: if she's such a great publisher, why is she paying attention to me? I had fallen into the mindset of Groucho Marx's joke: “I don't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member.”

I shook off my concerns (after all, not only did the Simonds have a beagle, but his name was Bertie, which I knew was from P.J. Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster series, which told me they appreciated literate humor. Such are the weird idiosyncrasies that form a person's decision-making.) I emailed several of their authors for references, and found only universal praise for the Simonds. Shortly after, I signed with Beagle Bay, who published The Women's Daily Irony Supplement under their Creative Minds imprint in April 2007.

Working with Beagle Bay has been a total pleasure. Finally, I was working with reliable and honest professionals who I knew had my best interests at heart. We, too, have been mystified by the failure of another PR coup—I had a quote from my book on more than 5 million Starbucks cups—to spur sales, but together we have worked to move the book forward and to help it find its rightfully larger audience. The Women's Daily Irony Supplement has also scored many publishing awards, and Jacqueline and I tried to capitalize on that by writing a funny press release called Humor Writer Achieves “Athlete's Feat”, tying it into the Summer Olympics.

I'm convinced that much of the difficulty in breaking through to a larger audience is due to the rapidly changing media environment and the drastically lessened space in newspapers and magazines for the kind of slice-of-life humor that I write. That, and the fact that I don't have my own prime-time television program. In my final blog installment, I'll write about what I've learned works, and what doesn't, in trying to promote myself in a tough niche.

Posted by: Judy Gruen