New book - the difficult bit

A few weeks ago I wrote a letter to Charlie Bronson, the infamous prisoner who has been stuck in solitary confinement for almost 30 years. Charlie wrote a story for my last book, Bouncers and Bodyguards and is himself a best selling author with a large number of titles to his credit, as well as being an acclaimed poet and artist. We have kept in contact since he wrote for me. My letter to him a few weeks ago was to ask if he would consider writing a book with me. The title would be Respect and Reputation, he would write about respect and reputation inside, and I would write about it outside. I didn't expect him to say yes, as he gets tons of offers, nor had I got a confirmed publishing contract, it was just a brief initial enquiry! Almost immediately he replied and 'yes' he would love to join me on this and what a great idea it would be. And a few days after that I got his first chapters, even before I have even thought about putting pen to paper!
Of course I would not want to let Charlie down (who would?), especially as he is frantically writing - freehand as he has no access to a PC - so my first priority is to put a book proposal together pretty quickly and look for a decent publisher.
Thankfully, having had a few books published so far, I have a few contacts in the industry and have a little idea what a publisher will want to see in the initial proposal. But I am going to have to put my thinking hat on and put some ideas down on paper pretty quickly. Once I have done this I will update this blog again detailing exactly what proposal I am going to send and to what publishers.
And then the writing process begins as once a contract has been signed normally there will only be a few months before the first draft needs to be submitted, and time passes very quickly, especially when I am the world's worst for putting thing off until tomorrow which I had plenty of time to do today.
So keep in touch.