After the big thrill of getting my first box of author copies and seeing my name on the cover of a book, this week has been all about what comes next. My friend and I spent about twenty hours finishing up the last quarter of a synopsis and sample chapters for a proposal. All in all, we probably have about a hundred hours into this proposal. It's for a three book series that generated some interest at the Christian fiction writer's conference back in September. Now we just hope an editor likes the idea well enough to buy it. If we get a bite, it will likely be in three to six months with a publish date a year to two years after that.
I had some friends ask me if publishing always takes this long. These ladies were with me when I signed my contract back in April 2014 for the book now shipping from Amazon and will hit Wal-Mart shelves February 1. The short answer is, "YES!"
Don't go into writing if you want to be an overnight success. Not only does it take an average of ten years and four to six full-length manuscripts that never get out of your laptop's basement before you've put in enough work to sell something to a publisher, once it's sold you have about a year before you get to hold the results of your work.
Which is why the most fun I had this week was teaching the basics of a story plot to one of my violin students. He's twelve and wants to write science fiction. The smile on his face when we were done was instant gratification.
Until next time,
Becca
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