Behind the Book: 1

My super-easy path to publication with POE.

Or, quite possibly, the weirdest journey ever. Thought I’d share since today is the anniversary of the ABNA awards ceremony.

Me in 2013 at the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award ceremony. Shades by eBay, jacket by my college roommate who gave it to me, shirt by Salvation Army.

It only took me five short years to go from a logline to a published novel that reached, at one point, #12 on Amazon. Want to know how I did it? I’m still trying to figure that out myself, but here you go.

1. Find a contest

‘Member Twitter? Way back in 2009, before many of you were born, it wasn’t a flaming dumpster fire. I happened to stumble across a St. Martin’s Press contest—they were trying to jumpstart a ‘New Adult’ category and asked people to submit a logline of their completed novel with a 20-something main character. If they liked it, you could ‘win’ and get to submit.

I didn’t have a completed novel.

But I could spend half an hour coming up with a logline. So I cobbled something together and posted, figuring, that was fun, and went on with my day.

They picked a few authors, including…me. Could I send a 2-page synopsis and the first 50 pages? Oh, and by the way, what’s the title?

I didn’t have a synopsis.

I didn’t have 50 pages.

I didn’t even have 10.

And yeah, I didn’t have a title.

Drinking more coffee than is sane, I furiously wrote my little heart out while working a full-time job. I decided to call it POE because I just liked it as a title, no idea how I’d make it mean anything, and, bleary-eyed, sent it in a month later. Figured, that was fun, and went on with my day.

One month later, I see an email. We’d like to see the full manuscript.

I didn’t have a full manuscript.

I spent the next two months wishing I’d gone into something more reasonable, like astrophysics, while jamming together 80,000 words and a plot. Pushed send, but now I wasn’t going to psyche myself into thinking it was going to be a bust. No, I was mentally casting the movie, planning how I’d break it to my boss that I was quitting to live the life of a full-time writer.

They passed.

2. Query agents

But I had a novel! Now I could actually approach agents with something other than vague hand gestures, and hey, it came close to being accepted, right?

I did my research on agents to approach, sprinkled the nice things St. Martin’s had said into my queries and began the super fun process of collecting kind words and nos. People said they loved the voice (yay!), thought it was fun (yay!) but, ‘Bookstores wouldn’t know where to shelve it.’ Translation: Novel does not fit into one genre box.

But then I got a very warm maybe from an agent!

But then she left the agency. Few sadder sentences in the English language than, If I weren’t leaving, I would have signed you.

I felt like I was CLOSE but clearly more was needed. Many agents suggested I land POE more firmly in horror. I wondered if maybe I could hire an editor to take a look.

3. Hire a pro

Remember the agent who left the agency? She actually left the profession entirely, but somehow I found out she was doing freelance editing.

I paid her $400 for a developmental edit (this is looking at the novel’s pace and structure, not copyediting). I have to thank her for the current opening of POE because that was further back in the novel, and she suggested that I move it up to make sure people knew they were going to be in for something weird.

With her edits in hand, I went back to the novel and began playing around with it. Because I wrote it without an outline, and in such a compressed timeframe (called pantsing), I started to see where there was just too much…stuff. I also had gotten super excited about Rasputin and the early 20th-century Russian obsession with the supernatural, and realized I’d gotten a bit wonky in places.

4. Query again

For the agents who’d requested a partial or full but passed, I sent an update that I’d worked on the novel to address some of the issues and would they want to take another look? Surprisingly to me, many took me up.

Again, nice things, but no. One told me politely, but firmly, that maybe it was time to work on something else.

5. Give up

I’d honestly sent it to everyone by this point, couldn’t see what else I could do, and consoled myself that I was at least on the radar of some folks. St. Martin’s had said they’d take a look at something else, so I figured it was time to call it a day and went back to the manuscript I’d been working on before the contest.

I was folding laundry when again, I saw a Twitter post about a contest. The Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. It was close to the deadline and they were capping entries at 10,000, but what interested me was that they had a category just for SciFi/Fantasy/Horror. Each category winner would get a $15K publication deal with Amazon, and one main winner would get $50K.

What the heck, free right? Better yet, I had an actual novel this time.

6. Submit to another contest

Given the fact that I could have wallpapered my room by that point with ‘nos’ for POE, my hopes were not high.

There were several phases. From the 10,000 entries, Amazon editors would choose 400 pitches. Excerpts from those novels were reviewed by editors and one top reviewer, and 100 would move on to the quarter-finals. The quarter-finalists were reviewed by customers, then someone from Publishers Weekly would weigh in, and 5 entries from each category would move on to the semi-finals. Amazon editors would pick the finalists for each category, and customers would pick the overall winner.

Like climbing Everest wearing shorts. But I submitted, figuring that was fun, and went on with my day.

7. Seriously?

It was like the novel version of American Idol. At every phase, I kept seeing POE on the list, which, when there were still 400, was like, oh, huh, that’s nice, but when it got to the quarter-finalist phase, I was trying to mentally prepare myself for the heartbreak of another near miss.

When it hit the semi-finals, I began madly emailing everyone who had passed, thinking “iron hot” and all that, and even if it did, gulp, win, I knew it was my best chance at landing an agent, which was my best chance of getting published after.

See all that failure up there ^? I at least knew this was a moment, and I had to act. Didn’t get many responses because hey, there’s no money to be made on a book that’s possibly going to be published anyway.

I did get a request from someone who was excited, we talked on the phone, and she’s been my agent ever since (she also somehow always manages to respond to my email within a couple of hours, which makes me wonder how, with her client list, she ever gets a break).

Anyway. One day I get a call from a 206 area code, which is not Maui (where I live), so I have a good idea what the news will be.

POE has been chosen as the SciFi/Fantasy/Horror finalist. I’m going to be published. I’m going to get cash. I’m going to be flown out to Seattle with my husband for some kind of ceremony on June 15 where the main winner will be announced. I’m going to stay in a hotel. I’m going to get a free Kindle.

I am walking on air.

8. Lose. But win.

This is my first trip to Seattle and it’s gorgeous. Everyone tells me that’s it’s summer and not usually like this, which I discount, eventually moving to the city (only to find that yeah, they were telling me the truth).

I didn’t get the big $50K prize, and, worse still, was forced to read from POE in front of a crowd of strangers (spent a lot of time in the bathroom trying to quell nerves on that front). But I had a pub date!

Secretly terrified.

And Amazon was just trying out some kind of new ad where they pushed book recommendations onto people’s Kindles. That produced some cool screenshots that I will be buried with.

#1 Horror

#1 Horror Author

9. What I learned

POE wound up selling a lot of copies, and thanks to my agent, I landed my next two books for publication and even had one of them optioned for a TV series. Here’s what I took away from it, although of course, your mileage may vary.

• Some of getting published is talent. A lot of it is luck. But your odds increase with persistence.

• Have a little faith in yourself (like maybe don’t enter a novel contest if you don’t have one). It’s hard starting out to have that confidence, like why should I spend all this time if it won’t get published, but the writing is the learning process.

• Set your own goalposts. Marketers have conditioned us to believe that getting past this or that goalpost guarantees happiness and success. There are a lot of miserable successful people.

• We’ll all be dead and forgotten in 200 years. Pursue what’s meaningful to you. Sing your song and screw it if people don’t get it. Eat that extra taco. Hug the people and critters you love.

But most importantly, after you hit ‘submit’, figure that was fun, and get on with your day.

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Amazon Breakthrough Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror Novel Award Winner

It’s Halloween, and life is grim for twenty-three-year-old Dimitri Petrov. It’s the one-year anniversary of his parents’ deaths, he’s stuck on page one thousand of his Rasputin zombie novel, and he makes his living writing obituaries.

But things turn from bleak to terrifying when Dimitri gets a last-minute assignment to cover a séance at the reputedly haunted Aspinwall Mansion.

There, Dimitri meets Lisa, a punk-rock drummer he falls hard for. But just as he’s about to ask her out, he unwittingly unleashes malevolent forces, throwing him into a deadly mystery. When Dimitri wakes up, he is in the morgue―icy cold and haunted by a cryptic warning given by a tantalizing female spirit.

As town residents begin to turn up gruesomely murdered, Dimitri must play detective in his own story and unravel the connections among his family, the Aspinwall Mansion, the female spirit, and the secrets held in a pair of crumbling antiquarian books. If he doesn’t, it’s quite possible Lisa will be the next victim.