Recently on one of my email loops, someone started a "how did you first get published" thread, and I responded. Then I decided (being basically lazy) to recycle that post as a blog entry. So, voila!

And, hey, I'm feeling a little nostalgic. I just looked me up on Amazon, and there are 19 books listed. I have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA how I managed to write so many books back when I had a day job. Oh, wait. I never slept or read anything I wasn't writing or that wasn't emailed to me from my critique partners. Oh yeah ...

Anyway, here's my story. If you don't care, please don't tell me. I'm deluding myself that this is truly fascinating stuff here ...

The most interesting are my first and second sales (directly from contests) and the sale of my 10th book (can't remember which "sale" it was), which was the sale of one book because of a rejected proposal.

Before I was published, I was a contest slut ... but a discriminating one. I knew I was targeting Temptation for my category stuff, and any house that would publish paranormal (at the time, that was pretty much Dorchester; my how things have changed in only 5 years!) for single title, and so I entered contests where the final judges were editors for that line/those houses.

My first manuscript did well in contests, but never well enough. But I got enough good feedback to use it as "marketing material" in query letters (a tool which I personally think is pretty effective). Brenda Chin at Temptation requested the mss, but rejected it as not having a sexy enough premise (it didn't. it also starred an underwater archeologist and a documentary film maker. Um, yeah. not gonna happen). At any rate, I determined to go "sexy premise" all the way, and I did. That book, which ended up being my first sale (Nobody Does It Better), started finaling and winning contests, one of which was judged by Brenda. At the time, I had about 140 pp of a 220 page mss written. She requested the full, and I finished it in about 2 weeks. If memory serves, that was about October. About December, I heard back that she was sending it up the ladder for approval. THAT was a long wait, but in June I sold it! VERY BIG THRILL she says, in the understatement of the year. (That was the TARA contest, by the way)

Meanwhile, I'd been working on a very unmarketable paranormal about a cat who's in love with her master. I was entering it in contests and it was finaling, but usually w/ the comment that I was working a really tough market. It won a contest (the Merritt) and was judged by Chris Keeslar at Dorchester, who requested the full. That was after the Harlequin sale, though, and I was knee deep in revisions on the Temptation (and they were paying me for that one!) so finalizing CAT got set aside. Imagine my surprise when I got a call from an assistant at Dorchester asking where the book was! I explained that I'd sold to HQ, and didn't have time to finish the book on spec, but would they take a seven chapter partial (all I had done at the time. My chapters were about 30 pp long, so that was a good chunk of the book). They said yes.

Meanwhile, I got the contract for NDIB, negotiated it myself and then decided that was a HUGE waste of my time and I'd be much better served paying someone else 15% to do it for me. And so I hired an agent who I'd been talking with (she knew I had "I'm an attorney-do I need an agent?" reservations). By the time I got the call for The Cat's Fancy in September, she was already on board and negotiated it.

So that's story of my first two sales (one category, one single title). Here's another interesting story that's food for thought in the "there are no wasted mss" department. Before chick lit really existed as a label, I started this first person mss that, in retrospect, really is chick lit. Very edge, very sexy, and very over the top. We shopped it around and it was almost bought by several houses. But they could never quite figure out how to market it. BUT, it did catch one editor's attention so much (and she'd already read Aphrodite's Kiss and liked my voice) that she asked me if I would turn in a straight romance proposal. I was in deadline hell and also preparing for trial, and I told my agent I simply didn't have time. BUT I did have five pages of a story I'd been playing with a while previously. I'd thought of the idea when Duets launched, but it was really a "bigger" book. I'd just never developed it. So we sent that, the editor loved it, and she bought me based on having read those 5 pages (which had just been sitting in a computer file) and the submitted proposal (which still has never sold and frankly never will). That book became Nobody But You, which was out last year from Pocket.

I guess the moral of the story is that even if something doesn't sell right away (or ever) that doesn't mean that it won't ultimately end up being useful to your career (heck, even if no one but you ever sees it, it's still useful for honing your craft).

And there you go. My "first and future sale" war story. Please, please, pretend to be fascinated :)