At Any Cost
My new romantic suspense, At Any Cost, is now available at Amazon.
The decision to publish it myself was not an easy one. I'd written it with the intention - and dare I say certainty - that it would be traditionally published. At first, it certainly looked like it was going that direction. My agent loved it but saw the potential for it to be even better, so we worked over the course of a spring to get it in shape to send out. Our first round went to six publishers. Three rejected it. One - Mira - asked for a re-write. One didn't answer right away. The other one never gave any response. I jumped on the opportunity to do a rewrite-and-resubmit. When she rejected it, I was crushed but undeterred. And anyway, she suggested we send it to a different editor. When we were rejected again, I put the book away and got to work on something else.
Then one of the original publishers came back and asked for her own r-and-r. She loved it. She passed it to her editorial director, who rejected it.
By this point, I knew that this version was the best version out there and that I didn't want to re-write it. I had emotionally moved on to other projects. I'd written two new books. But I also didn't want to just let the book linger. My agent suggested that I hold on to it, certain that after another book sold, it would be easier to sell my backlist. But life moves so quickly; I was afraid the references would become aged, that the book itself would begin to sound stale. That is what happened with my book, God's Country, which had almost the same exact route as At Any Cost. So, determined not to let the book languish, I published it myself on Amazon.
It has been up for less than a week and is selling better than I thought it would, considering it has no marketing behind it and it doesn't have a super-fancy cover, like most romantic fiction does. To compensate for my rather inferior Photoshop skills, I made sure to put a pretty explicit summary on the Amazon page. That summary is almost an exact copy of my query letter.
I am not sure if I will self-publish any more large-scale works. I really want the traditional publishing contract. But for now, it is nice to feel like at least some people are actually getting to read my work, instead of letting the manuscript die a quiet, dignified death in my sock drawer.
Happy reading!
The decision to publish it myself was not an easy one. I'd written it with the intention - and dare I say certainty - that it would be traditionally published. At first, it certainly looked like it was going that direction. My agent loved it but saw the potential for it to be even better, so we worked over the course of a spring to get it in shape to send out. Our first round went to six publishers. Three rejected it. One - Mira - asked for a re-write. One didn't answer right away. The other one never gave any response. I jumped on the opportunity to do a rewrite-and-resubmit. When she rejected it, I was crushed but undeterred. And anyway, she suggested we send it to a different editor. When we were rejected again, I put the book away and got to work on something else.
Then one of the original publishers came back and asked for her own r-and-r. She loved it. She passed it to her editorial director, who rejected it.
By this point, I knew that this version was the best version out there and that I didn't want to re-write it. I had emotionally moved on to other projects. I'd written two new books. But I also didn't want to just let the book linger. My agent suggested that I hold on to it, certain that after another book sold, it would be easier to sell my backlist. But life moves so quickly; I was afraid the references would become aged, that the book itself would begin to sound stale. That is what happened with my book, God's Country, which had almost the same exact route as At Any Cost. So, determined not to let the book languish, I published it myself on Amazon.
It has been up for less than a week and is selling better than I thought it would, considering it has no marketing behind it and it doesn't have a super-fancy cover, like most romantic fiction does. To compensate for my rather inferior Photoshop skills, I made sure to put a pretty explicit summary on the Amazon page. That summary is almost an exact copy of my query letter.
I am not sure if I will self-publish any more large-scale works. I really want the traditional publishing contract. But for now, it is nice to feel like at least some people are actually getting to read my work, instead of letting the manuscript die a quiet, dignified death in my sock drawer.
Happy reading!
No comments have been added yet.
