Today I was asked how long the whole process has taken me, I thought I could do a little recap of my road to publishing. First off I want to say it takes a lot of hard work, dedication and you have to love what you do. I am a stay at home mother and I have been able to work on my writing career full time. This has consisted of a ton of networking, research, and writing, some good and some bad. I have met some amazing writers, agents, editors and publishers through the past few years. So my first suggestion is do your home work.
So I began writing Immortal Embrace in December 2009, after many re-writes and revisions I decided to have it professionally edited. I hired a editor to do a full edit of my book, this included content, grammar, spelling, and readability the entire editing process took about three months (this was a little long because my editor had a family loss). I then began my query process November 5, 2010 (I still have not heard from this first agent). To date I have collected about thirty rejections, closed fifteen queries to no response and still have nine queries outstanding. After only wanting to go the traditional route I began looking at e-publisher from there I received one referral, and two rejections. During this time I continued to research my options and look for a home for Immortal Embrace. I also continued to write, I have completed two other stories and have two working in progress. I also began writing articles online and was even paid for these.
This week I noticed a message from Vamptasy Publishing with the subject Query/Immortal Embrace. I have gotten used to seeing these and no longer get excited, it is quite the opposite. When I see my query being returned to me I didn't think, Oh maybe this is the one. Instead I thought Oh here's my next rejection, wonder if they have any feed back? I opened the e-mail and was shocked to see an offer to publish staring back at me. There is no way to describe the excitement one feels when they realize their dreams. I was shaking and couldn't speak...actually I squealed. I went running down the stair, with my cell phone in hand (I opened the e-mail on my cell) "EEEEEEEEEEEEE" was all that came out. My daughter asked "What is it?" and I threw my phone at her to read. The next several hours consisted of me jumping around and screaming with a small group of preteen girls (and I felt like one too). Now with a contract, a book cover, authors page, I finally feel like a real author. Now I know I was before, but any of you unpublished authors out there...well you know what I mean. It is a kind of validation, you get that after you finish your novel and then again when you take the next step.
I hope this helps any of you who are still looking to publish you book or even if you are thinking about writing a book. I wish you all the best of luck in whatever your dream is and I am glad to share mine with you now. I am a believer in following your dreams so the best piece of advice I can give you is a quote from Gandhi. "A man is but the product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes."
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