“FULLY INVOLVED” IS FULL STEAM AHEAD

After twelve years, the “big one,” the book I’ve dreamed about and wanted to write is coming together and better than I ever dared hope.  I’ve written, re-written, edited, changed and changed back, reworked and redone this book so many times, I wondered if it would ever make sense to anyone but me, and yes – happily, now it does.

As mentioned in my previous blog, I tried the querying agent route and was rewarded with rejection after rejection.  I began to look more closely at the books being published by the big houses and didn’t really like what I saw.  They looked too abstract and hard core modern. My book is a romance, of sorts, an action story, of sorts, with a little bit of social awareness commentary about cancer awareness in the fire service.  In other words, my book didn’t fit a particular genre and agents love genres.  So . . . after submitting to multiple agents and researching for more, I realized that what I really wanted was to self-publish this book and retain control to give the book the look I really wanted it to have. Happy to say, I am finding much success, and I’ve only started its publishing journey.

I met for with my editor for the first time this weekend after he completed the content and line editing for the first half of the book. I was afraid he’d tell me not to quit my day job, but I was very pleased with how well the meeting went and the comments he made letting me know he fully understood the characters and was enjoying reading my book. Never fear though, he did leave me a lot of things to change, things to consider changing and things to rewrite.  He has the reputation of making a good book great, and that’s what I’m going for.

As if the positive meeting and subsequent conversation with my wonderful editor weren’t enough, the photo shoot for the book’s cover was this past weekend too.  I was thrilled with the results!  I snuck taking a few pictures which look great, but I can’t wait to get the final photos from the professional photographer.  They already have the ‘look’ I was hoping to achieve so I know her photos will be amazing.  My thanks to Lacy, the photographer, and to Andrew and Kelsey who were the perfect models for the cover.

I know some people will think I’m crazy to self-publish and not wait it out to find an agent, but I am totally confident in my decision.  This is my book, and this is my book my way.  I’m thinking those silly agents will be sorry when this is a best seller because . . . you gotta think BIG and you gotta think positive.