The Key To a Book Deal? Luck, and Perseverance

I remember years ago when I was still a reporter for a small rag in town that I was asked to interview local author Kate Collins who had just released the 13th book in her ongoing mystery series (Nightshade on Elm Street I believe it was). I was thrilled with the assignment! It was partly because it's always nice to hear a fellow author hold forth about their work and process, but it was also because I wanted to talk to someone who was clearly more successful in the book racket than I was. I had the same burning question that I've heard asked in hundred different panels at a dozen different conventions now.

How did you do it?

Seriously, you got 13 of these, and it's not your only series!

 

The answer Ms. Collins gave was as honest as it was disappointing. All these years later, though, I can vouch for its veracity. None of us like hearing this, and none of us want to believe it, but the sooner you do, the sooner you'll be able to move forward with your career.

It's luck. That's all there is to it. All you have to do is make sure that you, or your manuscript, happen to be in the right place at the right time to close a deal, and you've got it made.

For her, it had simply been putting her manuscript in the right hands by pure chance. She'd submitted a romance novel to Viking more than ten years ago at the time of the interview, and it just so happened to catch the editor's eye while they were looking for the specific flavor she'd penned. It wasn't the font she used, the typeface she wrote in, or some trick of phrasing in her cover letter that made her stand out as more worthy of being read. It was just that she happened to get plucked off the pile that day.

Of all the authors I've spoken with over the years, this is the one commonality that all of us share. When someone asks how we got our books published it was never the culmination of a carefully enacted plan like something out of Ocean's 11. Without fail it's always been because of some random quirk of chance. Someone we talked to at a party, a friend of a friend who heard about what we did, or in my case impressing the right people at a panel.

It's Honestly How I Got My Book Contract

For those of you who haven't seen it yet, my new novel was released at the beginning of the month! It's a mean streets noir story about an alley cat from the Bronx who gets caught up in a pissing contest over turf rights on the south side. At first Leo's just there to help out a church mouse named Charity who's caught up in trouble, but the deeper he digs, the less sense it all makes. When all the twists and turns play out, though, he finds out why a ruined church has suddenly become... Marked Territory!

Come on... you know you wanna check it out!

I finished writing the manuscript for this novel toward the end of last summer, and I was letting it cool for a bit before I went over it and got it ready for submissions. And it was last November that I happened to be on a panel at Windy Con with Joy Ward and Walt Boyes, who in addition to being long-term authors in their own right also happen to work for Eric Flint's Ring of Fire Press. This wasn't our first acquaintance either; I'd met Joy a year before and we'd chatted after a panel I was on, which put us on smiling-and-nodding-in-the-halls terms.

 

Con folks will know exactly what I mean.

All three of us were on a panel talking about how to start your career as a writer. The three of us, along with Richard Knaak (whose books you should check out, by the by) were going back and forth, answering questions, giving advice, etc. We had a surprisingly large audience for a small con, and we did our best to just give them the facts. It was after another panel that I happened to be on with Walt and Joy that we found some time to talk about what we were working on. I casually mentioned that I'd just finished this novel that was, "A traditional noir detective story, with all the violence and intrigue, but the whole cast are street animals in New York City."

I was talking for about 30 seconds, just pleased to have some folks who understood what it was like to work on something that was simultaneously difficult, and sort of silly. I remember Walt just nodded, gave me a smile, and said, "So, when are you going to let me take a look at it?"

That was it. No submitting to a slush pile, no going through channels, no inquiries about an agent or asking to see my previous work. I just happened to mention a project that intrigued him, and both Walt and Joy had heard me talk about my experiences on the same panel they'd been on, and so he decided to take a risk on me. I speed-edited the manuscript in a week or so, and got it into Walt's hands as fast as I could.

The rest, as they say, is history.

 

But You Have To Keep Rolling The Dice

They'll come up boxcars eventually!

So it's all about luck? That's the secret?

Well, yes and no.

As I've said so often on this blog, it takes a lot of work to become an overnight success. It's possible that your very first reading on open mic night, your very first time sitting on a panel at a convention, or the first after party you go to, you're going to make that connection that sparks an opportunity. Like picking up the dice, and rolling double sixes straight out of the gate, it can totally happen.

That's not likely to happen, though. But the upside is that every event you go to, every panel you volunteer for, and every time you sit at a table in a dealer's hall or a signing event, that's one more chance for you to meet people. One more chance for your paths to cross with new nodes on your network, and for an opportunity to present itself.

The one piece of advice I can give, though, is this; don't try to stack the deck in your favor. Don't be nice to someone hoping they can introduce you to their agent, or chat them up just to get them to look at your book. That sort of thing happens all the time, and it's exhausting. There's also no surer way to completely shoot yourself in the foot, and practically guarantee that the person you're hoping will help you is going to slam the door in your face... potentially literally.

Just make connections with people. Be polite, be professional, be respectful, and just enjoy their company. When you take all that pressure off yourself (and more importantly off the people you're talking to), that's when you're much more likely to find an opportunity drops out of the sky, and falls right in your lap.

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You can sign up here, or scroll down to the bottom of the page (if you're on the web version, rather than the mobile version of my blog). Hope to see you there, and make sure to tell your friends! The first issue is coming out next week at time of writing, and I'm hoping to get at least 50 names on the list by the weekend.

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That's all for this week's Business of Writing! If you'd like to see more of my work, take a look at my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife as well as my recent collection The Rejects!

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