Business

I’ve been keeping a little secret. My agent, Elisabeth, sent my manuscript, Unbounded The Last Will of Moira Leahy, to a hand-picked group of editors just over a week ago. I didn’t blog about it because this stuff is crazy making, and I didn’t want to think about it long enough to have to write a post. But it doesn’t work like that. You think about it. And you think about it. And you think about it with every tick of the clock. Would we get multiple nibbles, or rejections? Would the story that’s had my gut tied in knots for longer than I care to recall finally find a home? How long would the process likely take?

Well, things were quick and chaotic and, ultimately, wonderful. I am elated to report that the story has sold! But rather than listen to me whoop and holler, I thought you might be interested in learning a little more about the journey and prelude to the editor hunt.

This was my experience.

I am reading the galleys for my next book, THE LOST RECIPE FOR HAPPINESS, which (finally) has a firm release date of December 30, 2008. It’s been a long time arriving in stores—the book was finished over a year ago, but everyone involved (agent, editor, publisher, self) feel that is it a special, magical book, and we wanted to make sure it had the attention and launch it deserves. That meant a number of changes (publisher, imprint, editor) and waiting for the right moment to bring it out. It will be a part of the Bantam Discovery program, which is a line devoted to showcasing writers who haven’t yet been noticed in a big way. Some are debut authors, such as Sarah Addison Allen (the utterly wonderful Garden Spells). Others have been published awhile, but haven’t yet attracted the audience they deserve, as with Jonathan Tropper, a man who writes beautiful stuff about life and relationships.

The Lost Recipe for Happiness will be the January book, and it will be released under a new name, Barbara O’Neal. There was a lot of discussion over whether to do this—the book has a strong thread of magic realism, but that wouldn’t throw my core readers all that much. Magic realism has appeared in my work many times—in the roses and spells of the grandmother in A Piece of Heaven; in the ghost of Lucille in Goddess of Kitchen Avenue, in the bond between twins in Lady Luck’s Map of Vegas. Magic realism has been a thread in my work from the earliest days as a category romance writer—legend meeting love, hints of the magic of an old woman’s story, reincarnation, ghosts, saints All sorts of things. Lost Recipe is just takes that thread and moves it forward one (giant) step.

There were a couple of good reasons to stick with the Barbara Samuel name, too. I’ve won awards. A lot of them, honestly. And I’ve been very positively reviewed, for the most part, in publications across the country. Within Romance Writers of America, I have a good reputation, and I have gained visibility as a teacher.

And yet, all the way through the writing of Lost Recipe, the possibility of publishing it under a new name stuck with me. Maybe my thoughts will help some of you decide if/where/when to take a pseudonym.

Life’s been nutty for Kath and me lately, but we don’t want you starving for books & business news. Here are some of the latest happenings:

Merriam-Webster added some new words to the dictionary last week, including “webinar,” “fanboy,” and one that should’ve been there eons ago (says the health writer in me), “phytonutrient.”

Salman Rushdie won the Best of the Booker award –an award created in order to celebrate 40 years of this prestigious annual UK award.

A 400-year-old stolen work of Shakespeare’s–missing for a decade–has been recovered.

From Publisher’s Weekly:

Borders has added a new audiobook download service, which it is calling Borders Audiobook Downloads, to its remade Borders.com Web site. The service launched yesterday with 15,000 titles, including fiction and nonfiction bestsellers, classics, self-help and children’s books. Borders will add hundreds of new titles each week.

Ebooks seem to be riding high tide right now. Amazon is reporting that the Kindle accounts for 12% of the sales for all book titles sold…and some of them sold to agent Nathan Bransford. Click HERE to read his agently opinion on the reader’s usefulness.

In more news from the blogosphere…

There’s some seriously great news coming, so I’ll start it off with my announcement: As of this past Friday, I have an agent! Now before I tell you how much I love her, let me back up a sec–because the journey deserves a retrospective glance.

You know I’ve been working on the same manuscript since Kath and I started Writer Unboxed. You’ve read about my struggles with the unpublished writer’s seven deadly sins, not to mention guy talk that sounds authentic and outlines that feel confining. I’ve shared my angst over writing a big story, dealing with sagging middles and finishing the first draft. Earlier this year, I finished the final draft of my wip. I’d researched how to write a query letter and experimented with tightening tricks to ensure agents would read beyond the first five pages.

It was time to get serious about the next step.

So I subscribed to Publishers Marketplace and developed a strategy: I’d call my fuzzy-genre manuscript “commercial fiction” until someone who knew better could put another label on it. I came up with my agent wish list. I identified published novels I felt conveyed a similar emotional tone as mine, ready to include the comp in my query. Then I wrote the dreaded query. And rewrote it.

A few months ago, I started to send out personalized, highly researched query letters. And had feedback pretty quickly. My post on batheticness was inspired by a telephone conversation with a fabulous agent who wasn’t going to be fabulous for me; he’d liked my story’s premise but wasn’t keen on the overall direction I’d chosen to take. This was followed by a post about laughing off rejection, inspired by a note from an agent who said my writing was “fantastic,” but how would she market it? Doubt started to creep in. Maybe it just wasn’t going to happen.

I gave the negative chatter a smackdown. No way. I’d worked too hard, too long for that. I wrote about my son, a baseball fanatic, overcoming over coaching in homestretch writing–about blocking out all the voices and following your gut. And my gut had said the manuscript was right, and it was finished. I had to believe it.

But I can’t deny that when I first saw Elisabeth Weed‘s name in my inbox, I wondered if it would be another rejection.

It wasn’t.

Everyone’s familiar with movie trailers—and everyone knows how some of them really work, really whetting your appetite for the movie. And how others somehow take all the juice from it, spoil your enjoyment by letting you in on all the jokes, for instance. The difference between the good and bad movie trailers of course is whether they act as an enticing, spicy appetiser; or as the kind of stodgy nibbles that spoil your appetite for the main course. And that’s the same with book trailers.

If you’re not familiar with book trailers, they’re the latest thing in book publicity. They’ve always been around, up to a point, in the form of ads for blockbuster books that you might see on TV. Those were expensive and could ever really be indulged in by publishing companies. Mostly, though, the book-jacket blurb became a kind of virtual trailer—with the lengthy and often too revealing blurbs of the past replaced by short, snappy, intriguing little amuse gueules, as the French term appetisers—the better to entice the reader in. Authors couldn’t even consider the idea of making their own video publicity—not only was it expensive, but where would you place it after you’d made it? Send it to bookshops perhaps—but that would beggar your average writer.

That was of course until the advent of Web 2.0 and the proliferation of do-it-yourself publicity/networking sites such as My Space, Bebo, Facebook—and, most especially, You Tube. Now any author armed with a computer, basic movie-making software, and a good dash of imagination, can create his or her book trailer that includes words, pictures, and music. Not only does it work well as an Internet showcase for the book—and can be used by your publishers for their regular publicity—it’s also a lot of fun to make.