Persist.

Four years ago, I’d completed two novels in a mystery/thriller series. There was a lot of media buzz about self-publishing, and I was on the fence as to whether to go that way or hold out for a traditional deal. Over the months that I hemmed and hawed over my dilemma, I sensed that the golden moment for self-publishing might have already passed. Everyone and his aunt seemed to be slapping a book up on Amazon. Book rankings on their site had swollen past 10 million. Self-publishing my novel and hoping to get any attention felt like casting a grain of sand into the ocean and hoping anyone would notice the ripples.

So, I held out for traditional publishing. My first novel Never Speak was finally released by TCK Publishing in January.  How it got there can be read either as a tale of remarkable persistence or pathological obsession.

I was lucky to have an agent, except I’d inherited him from my father. I’d been with him ten years with nothing to show. He took an earlier draft of Never Speak around to traditional publishers. The effect was akin to that grain of sand in the sea: the sole response, from one editor, was “clever.” I liked my agent personally, but it was time to move on.

I pulled on a handful of agent connections with no luck. So, I began work on the dreaded query letter—a single page designed to entice the interest of editors who receive thousands a year. One agent brags of signing 4 authors yearly out of 20,000 queries. Those are terrible odds. I’m not the only writer who’s found this one-page letter more difficult than writing a book.

I got up every morning for a month and wrote a letter. I waited until afternoon, read it, then threw it in the trash. I googled “query letter editor” and found a woman who seemed nice and not too pricey. After seven drafts back-and-fourth I began to wonder if maybe the trouble was not with the letter, but with the book itself. I hired this woman to edit the whole book. Meanwhile, I sent a copy to an old friend, the most successful writer I know, to see what he thought.

I took many of my editor’s suggestions, mostly about “show don’t tell” and adding what she called “action beats”—physical scene material that keeps characters from being disembodied talking heads. A few days after I got the finished edit back, my old writer friend sent me a ten-page email critique of the manuscript along with an apology for its lateness (he was working on a movie.)

The critique hit me at just the right time in my process of learning to write. Like all useful criticism, his points resonated in my in a series of “aha” moments. But this wasn’t nit-picking stuff. It went to the heart of the story. I re-wrote the entire book.

Armed with a new and twice-improved manuscript, I hit the query letter again and crashed into the same brick wall. I hired a new query letter editor. Nine months into the process I finally had a letter I could live with. My new editor also took a pass at the first fifty pages of the manuscript. If you get interest from a publisher they often want to see the first chapters. I took my editor’s suggestion of planting a hook at the end of the first chapter.

Using the free resource  QueryTracker, I queried 130 agents in the mystery/thriller genre. Rejections poured into my email every day. But over a few weeks I got over 15 “requests for the manuscript.” I was psyched. But then rejections of the full manuscript started rolling in. That was hard. But two months into the process I got my agent. And as they say, it only takes one.

Evan Marshall  has the knowledge and skills you get from 35 years agenting. He’d signed me on the basis of my second novel, but after reading the first we decided he should take it out to editors who didn’t see it the first time. I’d done a complete re-write, tearing it down to the studs, and it was a much better book.

Rejections from editors came in my email once or twice a week. Most seemed like form letters.  After several months I was losing hope. Meanwhile, I’d completed a third book in my series. Evan was thrilled by it. When he sent this book out we got personal responses. Most took the form of “While this is compelling I don’t like that.” There was no consistency to the complaints—they didn’t like the characters, the story, the pacing, or the writing.

These responses were clearly an improvement over the past, but something about getting so close got me crazy. With each rejection I felt my writer’s confidence sink a little further.

And then came TCK. They’re a new breed—a digital publisher. I won’t see my books in Barnes and Noble (if that’s still even a thing.) But I have a three-book deal with TCK. They provide full editing services. They’re experts at marketing using the Amazon machine (and believe me, it’s one complicated beast.) I’m still doing a lot of marketing myself, but these days that would be true if I were with a traditional publisher. And the TCK royalty split is better than with the traditional outfits.

There’s a ton of advice online about how to get published, and lots of best-selling books about how to write a bestseller. There’s good advice and bad, and much that falls into the category of “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”

But if someone tells you to persist, you can never go wrong.

My novel NEVER SPEAK is published!
Order it here