My Road to Publication Part Three
Oops, I did it again!
It’s been a rough two weeks for me, so this will hopefully be a short post!
Tea: Yorkshire Gold. This is a real builder’s tea, the type to put hair on your chest (not literally). It’s great with milk and honey. I buy it from Amazon.
In Part Two, I wrote about writing and publishing my first book, Scandalous Women, in 2011. Nothing can describe the feeling you get when you open that box of your first published book. It’s a fantastic feeling and continued throughout the first year of publication. Scandalous Women was chosen as RT’s Non-Fiction Pick for April 2011, and the New York City chapter of Romance Writers of America awarded me Author of the Year. I read at Lady Jane’s Salon in Manhattan and did my first book signings at Author’s Night for the East Hampton Library1 and at the Historical Novel Society conference in San Diego.
I was asked to be a talking head on several episodes of The History Channel series How Sex Changed the World. I discussed Lola Montez on Monumental Mysteries and the Mayflower Madam for the Investigation Discovery show Tabloid2. Most of the publicity or events that I did came from my hustling. An article about the book appeared in Marie Claire Malaysia, and I did a few radio interviews and wrote many guest blog posts. Scandalous Women had a few foreign rights sales to Korea, Thailand, and Poland. Unfortunately, to this day, the audio rights to the book haven’t sold.
I also worked on a proposal for another book, From Commoner to Royalty. My publisher wasn’t interested in the proposal and turned it down. They felt that it was too different from Scandalous Women. That was the first proposal that was rejected. Over the next eight years, I wrote ten non-fiction proposals, alone and with a writing partner, and didn’t sell a single one. I also made some mistakes along the way. I was offered the chance to write a book for a UK publisher, but they weren’t paying an advance, only royalties, which I turned down. There was another opportunity to write a companion book for a popular reality TV that I also turned down after watching a few episodes. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against reality TV. I’ve watched every season of Love is Blind and Top Chef. It was just this particular reality TV show that I had a problem with. It was beginning to look like I was a one-hit wonder of the book world. Do I have any regrets? In hindsight, maybe I should have accepted the contract with the UK publisher. It just seemed like an awful lot of work with no guaranteed payout.
I wasn’t putting all my eggs in the non-fiction basket. I went back to writing fiction as well. I wrote a romance novella, which I submitted to a few contests, and I started writing a historical fiction novel that I put in a drawer and will never see the light of day. That book got derailed after receiving harsh criticism from an intern in my agent’s office. Not constructive criticism, ‘This book sucks,’ criticism. It knocked the wind out of my sails, for sure. Look, I realize that not everyone is going to like your work. This is why I have never read my reviews on either Amazon or Goodreads. However, I was always taught that you always give good and negative feedback. The old ‘spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.’ There was none of that. I was pretty devastated, but I managed to get up the courage to tell my agent that I would appreciate it if she didn’t give any of my work to this particular intern to read going forward. If I had been in a better headspace emotionally, I might have let the criticism roll off my back.
By 2019, I was depressed and discouraged. There were a lot of tears of frustration over the years. My agent had dropped me, and I was so stressed out that I came down with a nasty case of shingles.3 What turned things around was an email posted to the Tri-State Sisters in Crime loop. An editor from Globe Pequot Press was looking for an author to write a book about historical female criminals of New York State. It would be part of the Pretty Evil series. What? This was totally up my alley. I had even written a proposal for a book entitled Gilded but Deadly about Victorian murderesses. I immediately emailed the editor to find out more. She quickly responded that the book needed to be about 75,000 (I went over), and the parameters were no crimes after 1950 (which meant that Ann Woodward was out of the running for the book). Oh, and they would prefer that I rely on the period's primary resources (newspapers, magazines, etc.).
I quickly wrote a proposal for the book, writing a few pages about Polly Adler, a madam in 1920s and 1930s New York. The editor liked my writing, but Polly wasn’t, I guess, evil enough.4 I wrote sample pages on Emma Cunningham, and they bought the proposal. Ten years after I sold Scandalous Women, I finally sold another book, Pretty Evil New York. And then, the pandemic hit in early 2020, and my plans for hitting the library every weekend went out the window. Fortunately, the New York Public Library made resources such as ProQuest and Newspapers.com available to patrons at home. I would never have been able to write Pretty Evil New York from primary sources otherwise.
Like Scandalous Women, I had a year from when I sold the book to when I had to turn in the manuscript. I turned in the manuscript in January 2021, and the book came out that October!
I guess the moral of this post is that selling a first book is hard, but selling a second book can be even more challenging. Also, don’t give up hope; keep plugging away and improving your craft. Join writers’ organizations. I would never have known that Globe Pequot was looking for authors if I hadn’t joined Sisters in Crime and the local chapter.
My current WIP is a historical fiction idea that I’d been mulling for several years. Yes, I finally decided to take the plunge and start writing fiction again. It’s been a challenge but good, and I’ve gotten some amazing feedback from critique partners. I hope to have the book finished by the end of the year. Keep your fingers crossed.
What I’m reading: I generally have three or four books on the go simultaneously, a mixture of fiction and non-fiction.
Hattie by ReShonda Tate: I learned about this book through an email from the publisher and immediately had to get a copy. Hattie tells the story of actress Hattie McDaniel after she won the Best Supporting Actress Award for Gone with the Wind. It’s fascinating and heartbreaking to learn about Hattie's struggles even after winning an award that opened doors for her white counterparts.
The Lizzie and Belle Mysteries: Portraits and Poison by J.T. Williams - Portraits and Poison is a middle-grade mystery series I discovered accidentally on Amazon one day. The main characters are Lizzie Sancho and Dido Elizabeth Belle. This series gives the reader a look at what it was like to be black in Britain during the 18th century through the eyes of two pre-teens who also solve mysteries. I hope that this series continues.
What I’m watching:
Bad Sisters on AppleTV+ - I watched the first two episodes on the plane to London, and I’ve been dying to watch the rest of it ever since, but I had to wait until I gave up another streaming service first. It was worth the wait. I love it! One of the best shows on TV. It is dark and comedic.
Funny Woman on PBS - Based on a novel by Nick Hornby, there is a lot about this series that I love. It is set in 1960s London, which I’m obsessed with at the moment, it stars actors that I like, Gemma Arterton and Tom Bateman, and the premise is interesting. Barbara Parker has just one Miss Blackpool, but she wants more out of life than living in the seaside town, so she ditches the title and heads to London. I wish Barbara/Sophie had more agency; everything seems to happen to her, and she’s rarely the catalyst. Seeing how the characters grow in the next series will be interesting.
I sat next to the TV critic Jeffrey Lyons and listened to him complain the entire time that Susan Lucci’s line was longer than his. My friend and I schooled him on the awesomeness that is Susan Lucci.
I wasn’t paid for any of my appearances on TV. I did them because I hoped that they would sell books. I don’t know if it helped or not.
This was before I knew that there was a shingles vaccine.
I also wanted to include Madame Restell, the notorious 19th-century abortionist, but she was vetoed as well.