I started writing in 2008, my first year of being a stay-at-home mom. I had always jotted down the funny things my kids did and said (and there was A LOT of material there) but nothing formal. Complete sentences started when Bliss Creek (my first published novel) started taking shape in my head. I wrote and wrote and wrote, mostly by hand on yellow legal pads in a perfected chicken scratch.
Once finished, which, by the way, was years after I started, I began studying the art of the query. From what I gather, you can no longer submit written works to publishers without an agent. In order to get an agent, you have to “query” them. As with all beginnings, I started a spreadsheet of agents, dates of queries and results. To be frank, there was not a lot of data entries in this spreadsheet.
Within a month I had sent 12 queries, received 3 rejections, and was ghosted by the rest. I did not take this well, I took it personally. While personal to me, it wasn’t personal to them. Later I learned that finding an agent for a fiction novel is extremely hard. While my writing is good, I’m no Shakespeare and these agents receive hundreds if not thousands of queries a week. Mine either just didn’t stand out or did not meet the needs they were currently scouting for.
Despite my present-day rational view of this chain of events, at the time I was offended. I was not willing to risk someone rejecting my book, my baby, again. So, I did the most logical thing I could think of. I boxed Bliss Creek up and put it under a desk where it sat for the next eight years. I mean what else could I do?
Years later I blew off the cobwebs and revitalized Bliss Creek. One more round of edits and some googling of how to self-publish, I became a published author in January 2024. It was a learning experience that I will document for you at a later date, nonetheless, it is done. Now that the book was published, I needed to promote it.
One such avenue of promotion was to have a book launch/signing at a small bookstore. This sounded so simple to me! What could go wrong? I picked the bookstore I wanted to host my launch and worked up the nerve to visit them in person. I naively thought I would hand them my book and pencil myself into their book launch calendar and that would be that (she laughs sardonically).
Apparently, and now that I think about it, quite logically, Amazon (where I self-published) is a competitor of the small bookstores. Needless to say, when I handed them my book and asked to be penciled into their calendar they gently, but quite thoroughly, turned me down. After all of this time and taking a totally different route in order to avoid rejection – I have to face it once again. arghh to be continued . . .