Weekly Topic–How did you make your first sale?
Posted by Lynnette on 15 Jan 2007 | Tagged as: Chit Chat, Writing Life, Weekly Topics
It’s Monday again, therefore time to post this week’s weekly discussion topic for the week of: Jan 15-Jan 21.
This week’s topic is: “How did you make your first sale?”
How many books did the author complete before selling … how long it took that “winning” manuscript to go from submission to sale … whether there was an agent involved … and what, if anything, made the final difference in going from unpubbed to pubbed.
I can’t wait to hear everyone’s first sale stories.
~Blog Diva
I sold through a contest. Where He Belongs was the sixth full book I’d written (with various partials thrown in). My editor saw it in a chapter contest and requested the full, but I’d already sent it to another editor at the same house — who later rejected it! But then my editor saw the manuscript again in the Golden Heart and emailed me asking what had happened to it. She pulled it out of the reject pile and bought it — with absolutely no changes. So the contest were the key to my sale, as well as an editor who liked my voice enough to pull for me.
January 15th, 2007 at 11:01 amI sold my first ms the old fashioned way — with lots of submissions and revisions and re-submissions.
I wrote three complete manuscripts during this process and they were all different because I couldn’t decide what kind of romance I wanted to write. There was a short sexy contemporary (Temptation was a big imprint then), a long single title contemporary with paranormal elements, and a medieval. I would revise one ms, multiple submit it, then while I was waiting to hear back, revise the next one. This was in the early 1990’s and typically, I’d hear back from everyone in 3 to 4 months.
One fall I was so confident about the latest revision of the medieval that I quit my job to write full time. (!) Yup, before I’d sold anything. That was probably the dumbest thing I’ve ever done - you can guess what happened. Every single editor and agent who had the ms rejected it. One editor, though, had written a nice letter, explaining everything she liked about the ms, then explaining why she wasn’t buying it. Essentially, she said that if I changed one thing, she’d like to look at it again.
That one thing (unfortunately) was the heroine’s motivation and the key to the plot. All I had to do was completely rewrite the last 2/3 of the book.
I did it, sent it back, and she bought it two weeks later. That was about 6 months after I’d left my job and I was pretty happy to get that phone call.
Claire
January 15th, 2007 at 12:29 pmClaire and Gail,
So you both sold your first work/s without an agent. Would you say it is better to find an agent first or sell then find agent?
Ree Mancini
January 15th, 2007 at 4:03 pmMy first sale came about quite unexpectedly. The publisher had been closed for submissions for quite some time and a friend of mine let me know the day they started accepting again.
I had become quite discouraged with my manuscript. It seemed that everyone loved it at first blush, but after reading the full, they would back off. I never did find out why.
I emailed my submission to the acquiring editor and she replied within six hours asking for the full. Another six hours after I sent the full in, she offered me the contract.
Needless to say, I was very excited. Finally a sale. I have no agent. I’ve contacted quite a few and even with two full length novels two short stories and a novella due out in a few weeks, I have no offer for representation yet.
Tianna
January 15th, 2007 at 6:51 pmRee -
I think it’s hard to make generalizations about representation, not only because you need to make the best of whatever your situation is, but because markets change.
I sold in 1992 to Harlequin/Silhouette, which at that time had a pretty standardized contract (because they didn’t publish much in single title then). I would have liked to have had an agent from the get-go and queried many many (MANY!) agents in those early days, but without success. In the end, I negotiated my own deal, and continued to do that for 11 books at HS. Maybe an agent would have done better. Maybe not. I didn’t have one, so it was the way it was.
You do your best. You make your choices and you live with them. It’s always been tough to get representation as an unpublished author, and it’s better to have no representation than to be signed with an agent who isn’t doing a good job for you.
c
January 15th, 2007 at 7:27 pmI sold the fifth book I’d written two years after I’d written it. Actually, it wasn’t even big enough to qualify as a book at 27,000 words, it was more of an exercise to see if I could write erotic romance. My mentor from the Beau Monde chapter coaxed the ms out of me and told me I should send it to Ellora’s Cave. I was reluctant because it was short and written in first person which nobody buys, right?
January 16th, 2007 at 12:33 pmI’m not sure if she put a good word in for me but they asked for the full 5 days after I submitted it and bought it 3 months later.
It wasn’t the book I’d thought I’d sell first and although I had an agent at the time, I basically sold it myself. But it was the book that gave me a publishing credential which led to more sales and a new agent.
I think the reason I sold that particular book was because I gave myself permission to push a few envelopes and not be afraid to write it the way I wanted to.
Well, I’m the odd one out I guess. I sold my series through an agent.
I started writing my very first book in 2002, finished it in 2003, and started the next in the series. By 2005, I began work on the third book in the series and decided I needed an agent. It took me about six months, but on Superbowl Sunday last year, I signed. In July, 2006 (less than six months later) he sold my series to Triskelion Publishing in a three book deal.
I wouldn’t trade my agent for the world. I find I’m able to focus more on the creative side of my writing career, and though involved with the decisions concerning my books, I’m not chewing down my fingernails over them, if you know what I mean.
January 16th, 2007 at 1:43 pmI think ideally one should have an agent make that first sale, but I didn’t let my lack of an agent stop me. When I finished Pirate’s Price I shopped it around to agents, and got some encouraging rejections, but they were still rejections.
So I approached a fledgling ebook publisher (this was in 2000), figuring ebook publishers might be more inclined to take a book that was short, and set in 19th C. Florida, two things that agents had told me were a problem with my book.
It worked, and Dreams Unlimited bought it. That first sale helped do two things–it inspired me to keep writing, and it started getting me noticed. It did not allow me to pay off the mortgage.[g]
But I still tell new authors that if you can get an agent, that’s the best way to go.
January 16th, 2007 at 5:02 pmRee - I got my agent right along with the first sale. Actually, I had met the agent at our chapter’s retreat and then sent her and another agent I’d met two partial manuscripts. (I also had a full manuscript out with a third agent who had requested it through a contest.) My agent contacted me right away after reading the partial and said she was interested in seeing the full manuscripts. The other two had not replied. Then I got “the call,” so I told the editor that I was seeking representation and would get back to her. I phoned the agent who had replied promptly, told her I got “the call,” and asked if she wanted to represent me. She said yes. Then I let the others know that I already had representation (they both apologized for not getting back to me). Truthfully, the fact that my agent was prompt was a big factor in choosing her. I wanted an agent who would put me as a priority, even writing category.
January 17th, 2007 at 6:23 amSo no, I didn’t need the agent to sell (but mind you, this was to Silhouette). However, I wanted an agent for career guidance, plus I hope to someday submit to single title.
Hi, After reading the previous replies, I guess the fact that this is highly individual is very clear. I met the editor who acquired me in Dallas at the RWA 96 convention. She announced the new Love Inspired line and I jumped over two rows of chairs and cornered her. No! That’s what I wanted to do. But I was demure and merely caught her at the end of the presentation.
January 17th, 2007 at 8:38 amI made my first sale through my agent. I’d written three historicals with paranormal elements, and though they all did extremely well in contests, I was told repeatedly that historicals were a hard sell and that mine were even more so because of the time period I’d chosen (early Roman Britain/Europe). I knew that paranormals were the way I wanted to go, so I bit my lip and decided to try my hand at contemporary paranormals. I’d received a very nice rejection letter from my agent on my last historical, but despite the rejection, I still wanted her.
So I queried her again, pitching the new manuscript, and in June of 2005 I very happily became her client. She sold the book (and the sequel) to Avon in October of 2005.
That’s the (very) short version of how I made my first sale.
January 17th, 2007 at 9:16 amI sold through a conference pitch session–and without an agent too. My pitch BTW was horrible, but two weeks after I sent off the full, I got the call.
January 17th, 2007 at 2:51 pmLori
I queried my agent, knowing he was just starting out. I thought that I would have more chance with a new agent because I was a new author.
January 18th, 2007 at 8:41 pmLots of people were wary about going with someone without a track record, but I didn’t have a track record either. I was thrilled when he asked for a full and when he loved it.
Regencies are a hard sell right now, but it is what I love to write and he is letting me do my thing. He sold my first book to Five Star, and I was so excited, I didn’t stop smiling for a week. but I didn’t realize just how scary a sale would be.
Since then I have sold a second book to Sourcebooks Inc and also have to produce an option book for them.
Michele
I’m kinda boring. I sold the first book I finished, to the second publisher I submitted it to. I went through the usual channels: followed the submission guidelines, mailed in the manuscript — and then had the good fortune to hit the right editor’s desk at the right time.
Mind you, I did have a long background in writing — short stories (most of which were rejected), plus news and commercials for radio. And there was that super-sucky first novel I never finished. I think all experience contributes to getting us where we are.
I sold without an agent. At first I wasn’t interested in finding one, because I was told that category contracts were very standard, and I didn’t want to give an agent 15 percent of money I could basically get on my own. Now that I’ve written a book that doesn’t fit any of the existing category lines, I’ve done a little agent searching. No bites yet. Need to gird my loins and get back to it!
January 18th, 2007 at 8:55 pmOooh, first sale. I guess you’d say I made mine through a contest as well, although I’d been submitting to and receiving encouraging and helpful rejections from the same editor for a couple years. But when my ms won the Blaze contest, she asked for the full, then bought it within 3 weeks of getting it.
I signed with my agent the week after I sold, but we’d already been talking about my single titles, so that was in the works already.
January 21st, 2007 at 12:06 pmI sold my fifth ms., but I think it was because I finally found the place where my stories belonged. I’d tried some short contemporary and then some long, and my stuff got bogged down at one house. I sent the ms. to Harlequin Superromance, and about 13 months later got a revision request. (From this point, I got a little crazy–I waited to do the revisions for about a year. You probably shouldn’t do that.) The revisions waited for another year–I should have called and I might have discovered that the editor who’d requested them had left the company. About a week after I called to ask about status, I got “the call.”
At the same time I was talking to Paula Eykelhof about my first sale, my daughter came home from school and she grew a bit annoyed that I hadn’t met her at the door as usual. I kept waving her off because she could be a touch shrill when annoyed. Finally, she departed the room, but returned with a complaining note in a few moments. She hurled her written advice that I should not be on the phone when my daughter returned from school and then sashayed off to her room while I tried to sound somewhat sensible (lost cause) and not to laugh at my girl’s out of character almost-teen-tantrum.
After I got off the phone, the girl and I danced around the house in joy.
January 22nd, 2007 at 7:16 am