My First Published Book (1996)

My first book was published in 1996. I haven't talked about the story behind it, so here it is. The book began as a crazy idea. I had been teaching English and German in Prague since 1993, and although there were a lot of textbooks out there (and all in British English), there weren't many readers. So I decided to write one. I decided on a detective story as the format, thinking that it might succeed in maintaining the reader's interest throughout the book. Mistaken Identity was born.

The book is about a detective story writer who finds himself solving a crime (and is not as good at it as he had expected). I remember when I started writing the book. I made an outline that looked something like this:

1. Writer (Bill Lorentz) has writer's block, looks out of window and sees something suspicious.
   
2. Sees clues everywhere, but cannot interpret them. His maid, Agnes, has a crime-solving mind from reading detective stories, not writing them (Bill).
3. Crime is solved by maid, but writer takes credit for it.
   

The book sold relatively well for the size of the target audience at which it had been aimed. It was reprinted a couple of times (and re-issued later in another format). I wrote it using American English as a protest. There were too few American English textbooks around in the Czech Republic.

And now some trivial information. I wrote the book on a laptop that belonged to the Czech Ministry of the Interior. My girlfriend at the time, Marta, was a Ministry employee and brought the laptop home to me on weekends to use. If they only new... Marta also served as a test case for me as well. And I thank her for her input.

After writing the book, I took the book the Fragment, one of the largest textbook publishers in the Czech Republic. They gave it to several people for recommendations. To make a short story even shorter, about ten weeks later I received a phone call, informing me that they would like to publish the book.

This is how I got involved in publishing. I was also offered an English teaching job at Fragment, which provided me unbelievable opportunities later on.

One thing that surprised me is that the book developed a following, albeit a small one. The publisher received several letters asking when the next episode would be published.
This was enough motivation for me to write one.

--James