I had written a screenplay (back when I was a fledgling screenwriter with a couple of microscopic-sized options under my belt), when a series of life events happened: I got an offer from Warner Bros for a development deal, but my youngest son’s best friend was killed in a car accident (literally same day) which was horrible on so many levels, and I was in L.A. Which also shows how random publishing could be - that editor thought “of course there should be a cozy set on a garlic farm,” while other editors we’d submitted to came back with a puzzled, “Seriously, a garlic farm?” It sold because the then-editor at Kensington was a huge garlic lover.
It was a little too weird for her, but she asked if I had anything else with a cat, and I did (although the cat wasn’t as major a character as the first one I sent her), and she loved it and offered representation. So when I heard that Rachel Brooks (BookEnds) was looking for cozies with cats, I sent her one that I’d already written but hadn’t had a chance to submit anywhere. It did turn out to be a tough sell to readers - I have some amazing readers who love the series, but not enough of them to earn a living. So, when I heard about a tiny boutique publisher starting up to specialize in cozy mysteries, I submitted there and sold the “unmarketable” story. I wrote romance for about ten years, and finally realized I wasn’t suited for writing romance, so I switched to cozy mysteries and did a bunch of writing (several completed manuscripts) and querying, got one manuscript rejected by everyone, but came close with two agents who said they loved it but didn’t think it was marketable.
There’s a book Shannon Page put together a few years ago called “The Usual Path to Publication” which has a longer version of this story along with a whole bunch of other publication stories from SF and Fantasy authors, which is a very interesting read and shows how differently people do it. This is how I developed my superstition that printing things out is bad luck… I also got an agent because I knew you were supposed to, and she was good for a while but then started being terrible and in 2004 I fired her and got another one. I sent the whole thing, and three months later he bought it, and he’s been my editor ever since, now 15 novels. He read it right away and asked for the whole thing. I replied and said I had written another novel - it had been a year! - and did he maybe want to see it in email. A year later, he rejected the novel in email, saying that it was the kind of book people who were going to write good books later wrote, and I shouldn’t try to doctor it into being publishable, I should write something else and send it to him.
In 1997 I printed out and sent a novel I’d finished to an editor I knew slightly socially online, and got on with writing another novel.
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