Notes on My Process - Getting Your Book Published
I have been working on my romance novels since the early 1990s, never with the intention to sell them. They were always for my enjoyment only and to be honest I didn't want the stress and time involvement of the publishing route. Finally, though, in 2007 I had written six of them and thought it might be time to do something with this library. I was getting a lot of great feedback from friends who I shared my books with. I had sunk so much time into these projects that I thought it would be worthwhile to at least see if I could have that not be "wasted time". Also, just as importantly, many of my BellaOnline editors wanted to publish and were curious how it worked. I figured I could use myself as a human guinea pig and document the process for them.My first thought was to openly pursue this as a research project and find a publisher who was small, supported women writers, was environmentally conscious and who I could actively promote and support with my many websites. I did a lot of research and then wrote to BookEnds. I was offering a lot of free publicity in return for just a few paragraphs of insight on how this process tended to work. After three months I got back a form letter of "not interested". I decided this tack was not going to work.
Next, I decided to simply approach it as a "typical author". I began with my first novel, Badge of Honor, and sent it out to Harlequin, figuring they were the biggest and best romance publishing house. I promptly got back a "we got your submission" letter - and then several months later I got a form letter saying "sorry, not for us." I realized how frustrating the process could be. If a publishing house tells you you must submit to them and only them, it means you could try at maximum four (or maybe three) publishing houses in a given year. You send to one, wait around for 3-4 months, get back a rejection, send to the next and so on. The time lag here is just phenomenal. Not only that, but since they send you a form letter rejection, you have no idea if your novel was "really close to accepted" or "needs major work".
I was planning on just submitting to one publishing house at a time, and then to have them publish all six of my novels, but now that the process was unfolding to me in such a time-delay manner I decided I would be in my eighties if I tried this system. Instead, I next took all six novels and submitted each one to a separate publishing house. This way every novel was going to one and only one publishing house. If it got accepted there would be no conflict. If I did actually get picked up by two separate publishing houses - for two different books - I could figure that out. Maybe one house would want me to use a pseudonym. I would cross that bridge when I came to it.
The current status is that all books are out being evaluated. Check back with the individual publisher pages to see how they are doing!
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