Conville & Walsh

Andrea Wulf takes her book proposal to New York… Last year, I went to the Appalachian Mountains and the Catskills to research my second book, THE BROTHER GARDENERS: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession (to be published by William Heinemann in April 2008). It tells the story of the six men who created the craze for botany and gardening which overtook the public imagination in late eighteenth-century England. I had come to America equipped with the letters and journals of one of the book’s protagonists, an extraordinary American named John Bartram, a self-educated plant collector who began his life as a humble farmer and died as the King’s botanist. And while following Bartram’s footsteps through forests of towering trees and along precipitous mountain paths, I came up with the nucleus of a new book idea – about the American wilderness and the shaping of the nation during the American Revolution. My agent Patrick Walsh loved the idea so much that I ended up writing a 90-page proposal in the midst of the edit of THE BROTHER GARDENERS.

When I finished, I thought I deserved a break and planned a few relaxing days in New York – in celebration of both the completion of THE BROTHER GARDENERS and my proposal. I wanted to visit a few friends, go out and do some shopping. But Patrick had other ideas. When he heard of my trip, he got on a plane himself and began hand-delivering my proposal to some twenty editors. By the time I arrived a couple of days later, I had appointments with nine of them. I never entered a shop; instead, I traipsed from early breakfast on the Upper West Side to drinks on Union Square. Some of the publishers were a bit bemused because British books are almost never hand-sold by the agent and the author together. But the strategy seemed to work: within a couple of days I’d had six offers, and the deal was concluded within a week.