Big news!

To those of you who have stood beside me and believed in me and cheered me on in my writing journey, today I have some exciting news. I am thrilled to announce that I've signed a contract with Evernight Teen to publish my book, Emerald Bound!

The book will be released as an ebook and print on demand this fall. I am so excited to be joining the Evernight Teen family. They have been very easy to work with and respond quickly whenever I have questions. Evernight Teen will be the perfect home for my book.

I'd like to share a little bit about my journey and how I got to this point, because I always enjoy reading this information from other authors.

Emerald Bound is the second book I queried. My first was an upmarket women's fiction. It had a lot of heart and I loved writing it, but it was my first attempt and the writing just wasn't strong enough.

But I didn't know that. I thought my book was the best thing ever and believed everyone else would agree. (Ha!)

After a few months of querying and entering contests with no interest at all, I found and joined a local writing critique group--The Fairfield Scribes. Though joining was a major step out of my comfort zone, it was one of the best decisions I've ever made. The Scribes did not shy away from telling me exactly why my first book was not good enough. The Scribes also got me hooked on Diet Coke. (Hey, I needed something to keep me going during our weekly meetings, which often went late into the night).

I soaked up their advice, learned from it, and got to work on Emerald Bound, which is a YA fairytale retelling of The Princess and the Pea.

I began querying Emerald Bound in March of 2014, almost a year and a half ago. Right at the beginning, I entered Brenda Drake's Pitch Madness contest and was accepted onto Summer and Dee's Team Fizzee. I received several requests for partials and fulls from the contest, and so much wonderful feedback, but ultimately all of the agents passed. The feedback I received, however, was positive, and encouraging enough to keep me querying.

And querying.

And waiting.

And querying some more.   

Writers, you know how it is.

I received several requests for full and partial manuscripts. Summer happened and I spent a lot of time playing with my kids and trying not to focus on the manuscripts I had out to agents. Once the kids went back to school in the fall, I started working on another, unrelated manuscript. Every other weekend or so, I'd send out a couple of queries for Emerald Bound.

I heard about Evernight Teen in an interview I read by one of their authors and I decided I wanted to query them. They have a 'No Simultaneous Submissions' policy so I had to wait long enough to hear back on all the manuscripts and queries I had out before submitting to them. I queried them on May 22, 2015. Twenty-six days later, I had a letter in my inbox stating that they would be happy to publish my story!

For those who are interested, here are my query stats on Emerald Bound:

Number of queries: 73
Partial requests: 9
Full requests: 6
No response: 24

So the moral of this story, I guess, is to learn how to take feedback.

And to drink more Diet Coke.

Thank you to everyone who believed in me and kept me going. Thanks to my husband, who takes care of our kids for hours and hours every single Thursday night so I can go to Scribes. And thanks to the Scribes, who all hold very big pieces of my heart. I can't wait to see where our journeys take us.