How a Three Book Deal Has Changed My Life

Stephanie Dray/Draven often reminds me that I’ve gotten done in five years what took her more than ten to accomplish. Sometimes, I forget about this, and I forget about just how hard I’ve worked, and how much I’ve had to sacrifice to get myself where I am today. Trust me, if you don’t know the backstory, it’s not been an easy road, but I’ve gotten here, somehow.

I’m not the type of person to get overly-excited about something, not right away, that is. I’ll let things stew for a little bit, and then when everything starts to settle, that’s when it hits me. I did it. I sold THREE, full-length books all on my own, without an agent. Well, I can’t say it was ALL on my own. I did have some support from my dear friends, so leaving them without credit would be unfair of me.

But it’s finally been setting in, especially as I sit in front of my computer every night and flip back and forth between books, trying to decide which one I want to work on. It hits me when others ask me to read more of what I have because they genuinely like it. It hits me when my editors tell me how much they love the book, and it hits me when my husband just won’t stop talking about how his wife sold a series to a publisher. And this isn’t even the half of it.

So, to those of you who are agonizing over getting an agent to be successful…keep doing what you are doing and don’t get discouraged. After I had an agent I had to fire due to unprofessional comments, and another because I found he/she was lying to me, I was just about to give up on the industry all together. But I kept with it. I kept with it when an editor with a huge publishing house told me to revise and resubmit, then left the publishing house without telling me. Goodbye, R&R! My big break, gone, just like that.

But in those shadows, I’ve found light. I’ve found an amazing group of people at Entangled Publishing who believe in me and my work, and they’ve refilled my writing mojo bottle, for which I’m forever grateful.

The moral of this story is that that publishing gig takes a long time. You feel like you are wading water for most of this time, but just when you start to get tired, SOMETHING will happen for you. It will. It might not be as quickly as you want it to be, but it will happen. I promise. Just hang in there and keep writing. Like Stephanie Dray/Draven tells me, “Every manuscript you have is like a lottery ticket. Eventually, one of them will be a winner.”

I found my winner…have you?