My sixth novel, Loners, will be published on October 13. Whaaat?! How did that happen?!
I remember the thrill of holding my first book baby, A Slippery Slope, in 2012: “Now I can die happy!” I’d self-published the mystery, and when I say “self-published,” I mean I did it all myself. I haunted the bookstore with a tape measure calculating margins, seeing where the page numbers went, and what was included in front and back matter. I used my one free download from Shutterstock to secure a black and white photo I liked for the cover. I paid the princely sum of $50 to a graphic designer to convert my mock-up of front and back covers into a usable .pdf. Then I loaded the whole shebang onto Amazon, and pressed go.
My writing journey
I came late to writing. I was 63 when A Slippery Slope came out. I wrote it on the strength of a lifetime of reading fiction, one writing class, and the support and encouragement of my writing group, aspiring women writers I’d met in the aforementioned class. I also leaned on the vibrant wider writing community in my town, and on Village Books, a superb independent bookstore and unbeatable resource for readers and writers alike. So it’s not quite true that I did it all myself.
Still feeling the glow from my first attempt—Kirkus Reviews called it “a suspenseful, intelligent debut mystery novel”—I wrote another Sarah McKinney mystery, A Dangerous Descent. But now I knew what I didn’t know. I enlisted beta readers, and paid a professional editor to iron out flaws in the manuscript. I also began to realize that writing is the easy part. Marketing and promoting the book after publication is a whole different skill set, and a lot of work. Ninety percent of self-published authors sell less than one hundred copies.
With A Splintered Step in 2017, I exhausted my ideas for the scrapes that amateur detective Sarah McKinney could get into. But over the course of five years’ writing and revising, attending workshops, conferences and critique group meetings, I had honed my craft. I now possessed the confidence to go back to a story I had been struggling to write since 2010: Daughters of Riga. This World War II historical fiction is the book of my heart, the story I had to write. I was determined not to self-publish; I wanted the validation of a traditional publisher.
By 2023, after sixty-nine rejections (most of the “if you don’t hear from us in six weeks, it’s a no” variety) I was ready to give up. Then a chance encounter with a writer of historical fiction at an AWP conference in Seattle who gave me the name of her editor led to a contract with The Wild Rose Press.
The Wild Rose Press is women-owned. It was founded in 2006 by two published authors who were disheartened by how mainstream publishers treated their writers. They are upfront about their role: they are publishers, not a marketing and promotion firm. That is up to the individual writer.
I feel lucky to have been taken on by such a writer-friendly publisher, especially as they promptly accepted two other manuscripts completed during the long years of rejection. Six Degrees of Death came out last November. What started as a riff on the six degrees of separation theory became a tautly-plotted thriller—my first novel set on home ground in the Pacific Northwest. Next month’s release, Loners, is my second PNW mystery. This one has a stubborn female protagonist whose search for truth frustrates her boss and alienates her colleagues. I like Detective Christine McQuarry so much, I’m at work on a sequel.
I still feel a little pretentious speaking about “my writing journey.” I owe so much to luck and to the help of people who believed in me more than I believed in myself. If you’d like to learn more about my books and for sales links, please visit my website.
