Sophie Sabbage HOW I GOT MY FIRST MAJOR BOOK DEAL
IN LESS THAN SIX MONTHS THIS CANCER WHISPERER TOOK AN IDEA TO THE GLOBAL STAGE
Angela allows you to aim your arrow at a very clear target while leaving no room for procrastination, perfectionism or excuses.
At the age of 48, when I was a happily married mother of a four-year-old daughter, I was diagnosed with ‘incurable’ metastatic lung cancer that had spread to my lymph nodes, bones and brain. It was a blindsiding, devastating and terrifying experience. My prognosis was very poor.
Prior to this I had been a facilitator of human transformation for over twenty years, working with people from diverse cultures to create radical changes in their lives. I had worked for a not-forprofit international educational program since my twenties and built a successful business over two decades that delivered mindset transformation to leading global organizations. I had nothing to prove. I was doing what I love, following my calling
and had fulfilled many of my life ambitions…with one notable exception. I hadn’t written a book.
Being diagnosed with a ‘terminal’ illness crystallizes what really matters very quickly and starkly. Everything falls into its rightful place and declares its authentic relationship with you. For a while I was too busy bringing myself back from the brink of death to pick up my abandoned aspirations or attempt to be of service again. Amazingly, the mind concentrates with laser-like precision in the face of disaster and an astounding strength ascended like a fountain through my diseased spine, simultaneous and equiv alent to my despair. I became brave, determined and relentless in my pursuit of hope.
Within days of release it received major press coverage from leading UK newspapers ~
Sophie Sabbage
Traditional Deal
Major press with outlets like the BBC and The Observer
Thousands of copies sold before the deal was signed. Great negotiating leverage!
Multiple offers from agents
Auction for book rights with traditional publishers – multiple fast-tracked, major deal offers
Foreign rights sales in several languages (and more coming) Selected a Coronet’s lead Spring title Assigned to winner of the Book PR of the year 2015 award for a major, national media and speaking campaign
Audiobook narrated by the author
Nine months after my diagnosis, in the slipstream of a remarkable journey of healing and awakening, I felt well enough to write The Cancer Whisperer, How To Let Cancer Heal Your Life. Angela Lauria gave me the perfect platform to achieve this — a sim ple process that allows you to aim your arrow at a very clear target while leaving no room for procrastination, perfectionism or excuses — including late stage cancer. Boom! In five weeks flat it was done.
The Cancer Whisperer is part memoir
and part practical, emotional and spiritual support. I wanted to give people permission to talk about the deeply vulnerable, terrifying and sometimes surprisingly beautiful experience of living with cancer. I wanted to help them direct their own treatment and trust their own wisdom in the healing process. And I wanted to give people practical skills for dealing with fear, anger, denial and grief.
Above all I wrote this book to offer a radically different way of relating
Within six weeks a literary agent and a UK publisher approached me. “
to this disease. All too often we hear about the ‘war on cancer’ and those who die from it as ‘having lost their brave battle with cancer’. This is the language we use, over and over: war zone; battleground. The ones who live win and the ones who die lose. As someone who had been at war with my body much of my life—and who recognized cancer as my body’s last plea to make peace with it—I refused to align myself with this succeed—or fail framework that narrows the nar rative into a thin corridor of choices between beating and being beaten, fighting and giving up.
Cancer is an illness not an enemy. And like all illnesses it is asking us to pay attention to what is out of kilter in our minds, hearts, bodies and spirits. As I said in my book, “If cancer is the enemy, we are either its victim or its attacker. There is a wall between us, but no door. No dialogue.
No listening to what cancer has to teach us. No chance of reconciliation or peace.” This is the essence of cancer whispering: as patients we may or may not be able to heal our cancer, but if we stop the war and listen to the wisdom of our bodies we might be able to let cancer heal the underlying dis-eases in our lives.
“
This is what I mean by ‘cancer whispering’—tuning in to the language of our illness and translating its messages. Sometimes it is telling us something we need to correct in the way we are living our lives, something that could support our healing and recovery. Sometimes it is telling us something about ourselves that we have forgotten or discounted, a quality to fall back on like a bed of feathers or truth to reignite like a naked flame. And sometimes it is telling us something about the nature of reality that allows us to nestle in the folds of the universe and let go.
Media Attention and a Major Publishing Deal
The response to my book in the early weeks and months after publication was incredible. Within days of release it received major press coverage from leading UK newspapers, including a half-page article in The Observer and a full page of excerpts in The Daily Mail. One of these articles also ran in a sister newspaper in New Zealand. I was also interviewed on two BBC Radio shows, including a thirty-minute interview on Radio 5 Live, and was featured on some YouTube interviews and podcasts.
Within six weeks of launching the book on Amazon a literary agent approached me and passionately pitched to represent me, by which point I had been approached by a leading UK publisher too. I was asked to cease all PR and media activities while the book was put into a bidding auction between three major publishers, who all wrote me proposals and pitched for the rights to my book. With all I knew about how hard it is to get a publisher, I could hardly believe it.
The result of all this was a two book deal with the Coronet imprint of Hodder and Stoughton, a UK division of the Hachette Publishing Group to whom we sold the UK and Commonwealth rights. I did not accept the highest offer or most famous list. My choice was based on an immediate spiritual connection with the head of Coronet, Mark Booth (a.k.a. Jonathan Black, bestselling author of The Secret History of the World) and the firm belief that he would develop me as an author in future. He related to me as a writer first, a teacher second and a cancer patient third. It is already proving a complete joy and privilege to work with him, having submitted a new chapter before The Cancer Whisperer is published in hardback and audio (read by me!) on March, 10TH 2016.
rights
~ Sophie SabbageMy agent has since sold the translation rights to publishers in Germany and Brazil and, as a world rights expert, she is confident she can sell it to many more countries. She has also found me an excellent agent in the United States who loves my book and is determined to find me a publisher there. So watch this space my American friends! We have secured several contracts so far, including an advance on my next book from Hodder and Stoughton. Having been unable to work for eighteen months and been the primary earner in my family before I became ill, this is manna from heaven.
As I write I don’t know what publicity will actually take place, but The Cancer Whisperer is Coronet’s lead title this Spring and they have big plans for media interviews when the book is published: national TV and radio as well as newspapers and magazines. In addition, the Publicity Director of Hodder and Stoughton (a force of nature who won Book PR of the year in the UK in 2015) is doing all she can to line up speaking events for me on some significant platforms in the wake of the publicity in March. Seriously. My most used hashtag these days is #WTFsupposedtobedead.
I don’t know how all this will play out from here, but I am deeply grateful.
The Cancer Whisperer is Coronet’s lead title and they have big plans for media interviews: national TV, radio, newspapers and magazines. ”
My agent has sold
to publishers in Germany and Brazil and will to many more countries!
Not least to Angela Lauria who gave me the platform to launch from and supported me with great generosity of spirit when I told her what was going on. Some would expect The Author Incubator to insert itself at this point and look to profit from my success in some way. But their policy is to give 100% of the worldwide rights to their authors from the beginning so I was free to negotiate with any major publisher if this was the path I wanted to follow. They were in my corner all the way.
This really was what I wanted. More than increasing my subscribers and building my business, which is also happening, I wanted to write. To call myself an author, first and foremost, because that’s what I wanted to be since I was ten years old.
It is now nearly eighteen months since I was diagnosed. All the metastases in my lymph nodes, bones and brain (once too many to count), have gone. Gone. I am down to one small primary tumor in my lung and I have rarely felt more well in my life. I don’t know the future or how long I have. None of us do. But I do know what it is like to feel your life force leave your body and unbridled grief wash through your veins like a great river. And now I know how it feels to see my dreams resurrected and to stand on the utterly unexpected precipice of making the difference I may have been born to make.
The Cancer Whisperer
Both memoir and self-help book, this is the remarkable chronicle of a passage from ‘terminal’ diagnosis to exuberant wellness in just a few months. The Cancer Whisperer reverses our traditional adversarial relationship with cancer by teaching us how to listen to it; how to be healed by it as well as seek to cure it; and how to be emotionally free of illness even when physically curtailed.
Living on the frontier between her fierce will to live and necessary willingness to die, Sophie–now thriving with cancer–shares her journey with searing honesty, unapologetic vulnerability and intelligent pragmatism.
Inspired, wise and moving, this book carries us to a new threshold in our relationship with cancer, strengthening our ability to meet it with courage, creativity, gratitude and grace.
