It’s time for another author’s story! For the month of February, I’ve asked some authors to come share their experience the first time they submitted a manuscript to a publisher and/or agent–regardless of what the outcome was. Next up is the uber-fantastic, Lori Witt!
First Submission Series:
February 1: Emily Cale
February 7: Gina Gordon w/ Giveaway
February 10: Stacey Kennedy
~*~
First Submission
First, a confession: I’m one of those people who submitted a query the first week of December. Yeah, one of those queries. You know what I’m talking about.
“I finished my NaNo novel!” I cried along with the other fifty zillion winners of NaNoWriMo back in November 2008. “Now I’m going to get it published!”
I know. I know. Shut up.
It actually turned out to be a positive experience, though. And I’m cheating a little and discussing two different books because while only one is technically my first submission, the other was very, very close on its heels. These two situations happened almost simultaneously.
The first book was Camera Shy, which was my NaNo novel. It was my first erotic romance, and my second completed novel. (We do not speak of the first one, for it is chained in the attic where it will remain until the end of time.) The second was Playing With Fire, which I wrote in December. Yes, I wrote another novel the month after NaNo. If I gained anything from doing NaNo that year, it was the discipline and momentum to write novels in short periods of time. Three years later, I still average 1-2 books a month. So, believe me, I am not ripping on NaNo in the slightest. I could go on for pages about the reasons why I think NaNo is the bomb diggity, but that’s not what this post is about, so I digress. Focus, people, focus!
Anyway. So I queried Camera Shy and Playing With Fire within a few weeks of each other.
Camera Shy got a partial manuscript request.
Playing With Fire got a full manuscript request.
Needless to say, I was thrilled!
Within forty-eight hours of the full request, I was offered a contract on Playing With Fire. Heck yeah, I was stoked. More on that in a minute, though.
Sometimes the planets align in strange, unpredictable ways. Things happen so perfectly, you’re pretty sure you’re about to be punk’d. Such was the case with Camera Shy.
Let me backtrack a little to explain. During NaNo 2008, while I was in the midst of writing my first romance, I moved from the U.S. to Okinawa. This involved staying with my parents for a few weeks, letting my husband go on ahead to Japan, and then I was to follow him with our two cats once he had a place for us. It all worked like a well-oiled machine except for one small problem: someone (me) screwed up on some of the quarantine paperwork for the cats. Out of nearly a ream of forms, I’d messed up on the one that was a) 100% non-negotiable and b) had to be signed by the Japanese government and faxed back to me…a process that could not happen in the 12-hour window between discovering the error and boarding the plane.
Long story short: I flew to Japan without my cats. The plan was for us to get settled in, and then I’d fly back to the States, pick up the cats, and return. Believe it or not, it was actually cheaper – by a longshot – for me to do this than have them travel by themselves.
Tickets were purchased, and I was scheduled to be hurled across the ocean in a winged metal machine in early February 2009. I don’t like flying, if you can’t tell, which is awesome when one lives eleventy billion miles from anything…
Anyway. By sheer coincidence, the publisher who’d asked for the partial on Camera Shy had a policy wherein an author could follow up on a manuscript if there’d been no answer within a certain period of time. 45 days or something. I don’t remember exactly. What I do remember is that the period expired while I was in the States. So, I sent an e-mail to the editor.
She responded, saying she was still working on it, but she also made an offhand comment that it was unusual to get an e-mail from me at that time of day, seeing as I was in such an odd time zone. I commented that I was actually in the States right then, and after a few e-mails back and forth, we realized we were not only on the same continent, but she lived about 20 minutes away from my parents’ house.
So… we agreed to meet for lunch.
She told me upfront she wouldn’t be able to contract the book, at least not as it was currently, but she really liked it and wanted to discuss a few things about it. As someone only just getting my toes wet in the publishing industry, I was fine with that. I was having lunch with an editor, for crying out loud!
The next day, I met her at a café not far from where my folks lived. We spent the better part of two hours poring over the manuscript and discussing ways I could improve my writing, my characters, my plots, the sexual tension… everything. It was an incredibly educational conversation, and I came away feeling mildly bummed out that they weren’t contracting my manuscript, but confident that I was a step closer to being able to write something they would contract. That, and one of my other books had already been signed, so I definitely felt like I could do this.
Now, I had also started writing another book while I was on the plane. I was a few chapters into it by the time I had this lunch, and I went home that very day and looked at my outline with fresh eyes. I tweaked a bit here and there, played around with this and that, and applied everything I’d learned. And I liked where the book was going after that. I felt like I actually knew what I was doing, and continued the story with greater confidence than I’d had when I started it.
I flew back to Japan. I finished that book. I applied the things I knew to the next books. Time went by.
You may recall that I had sold Playing With Fire back in January. Wellllllll… things didn’t work out there. I won’t go into great detail here, but the short version is that the publisher merged with another publisher, and in June 2009, the new company dropped my contract.
Of course I was bummed, but sometimes these things happen. It’s just business, and in the long run, it was a good thing. (The more detailed version of that story is here.)
One thing that really kept me going after my contract was canceled? By that point, I already had another one. The book that I started on my trip, the one that was tackled with the knowledge and confidence the editor had given me, sold about three weeks before Playing With Fire was dropped. Naturally, I was scared to death the same thing would happen this time. I think it was about six hours after the book was released that I finally stopped worrying that someone was going to tell me “Nope, we’re not publishing this one after all.”
But they did publish it. In September 2009, a little under a year after the NaNoWriMo that got all of this in motion, Carnal Passions released my first book, Between Brothers. On February 21st 2012, three years and a couple of weeks since that lunch with an editor who happened to live near my parents when I just happened to be home because I screwed up on some paperwork to take my cats to Japan, Loose Id, LLC will release Where There’s Smoke, my twenty-ninth book.
So looking back, I was nowhere near ready to submit my book right after NaNo in 2008.
But you’d better believe I’m glad I did.
***
Lori Witt is an abnormal romance author who recently relocated from Okinawa, Japan, to Omaha, Nebraska. She writes as L. A. Witt (M/M romance) and Lauren Gallagher (M/F romance), and spends most of her days either beating the crap out of her keyboard or fighting with her cats for desk space. You would think a person and two cats could share a desk this big, but nooooo…
Website: http://www.loriawitt.com
Blog: http://gallagherwitt.blogspot.com
Twitter: GallagherWitt