Category Archives: How I Got Published

Twenty-five authors write about their publishing process. In this series you will meet writers of different genres: romance, mystery and crime, scifi and women’s fiction. Some traditionally published, some self-published. Some winners of high-end writing awards and on best seller lists. All taking their writing to the top.

How I Got Published: Katherine Prairie

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Katherine, a geologist and IT specialist, graduated from the University of Alberta and then went on to work in the oil and gas industry. Add a passion for computer programming and a M.Sc. in engineering hydrology from the University of British Columbia and you might call her the ultimate science nerd!

She stepped away from the international petroleum industry to fulfill a life-long dream of writing mysteries. And so Alex Graham, the intrepid mining geologist with a penchant for trouble, was born.

Katherine is an avid traveller with an insatiable curiosity, you never know where you’ll find her next! But most days, she’s in Vancouver, Canada quietly plotting murder and mayhem under the watchful eye of a cat. She is an award-winning presenter and the author of the thriller THIRST.

HOW I GOT PUBLISHED

Like every debut author, I queried and pitched agents, searching for someone who believed in my story as much as I did. And like every author who’s gone down this path, I faced a mound of rejection letters. But I also received more than a dozen requests for the full manuscript, so I knew Thirst showed promise.

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How I Got Published: Anthony Bidulka

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Anthony Bidulka is the author of two series. The fast paced thriller series featuring Disaster Recovery Agent Adam Saint and the long-running, award-winning mystery series featuring Russell Quant. Among his many awards are:

 2013 Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Best Men’s Mystery

2012 #1 Fiction Bestseller  McNally Robinson Saskatoon

2011 American Library Association GLBT Round Table Over The Rainbow Top Mystery

2010 Arthur Ellis Award for Best Crime Novel Finalist

2010 Rainbow Award for Best Gay Mystery/Thriller

2009 Saskatchewan Book Award Finalist for Book of the Year Award

Anthony loves to throw a good party, travel, collect art, write, and answer the question: Where the heck is Saskatchewan and why do you live there? He was inducted into the University of Saskatchewan’s Wall of Honour in 2011 and in 2014 was named Citizen of the Year for his community, charitable and professional pursuits in his home city of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

How I Got Published

I would wager a hefty amount that if you sat in a room with a dozen published writers and asked the same question, you’d get a dozen different answers. I’m grateful for that because I think it sends a hopeful message to new/beginning writers that there isn’t just one way to make this happen.

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How I Got Published: Wendy James

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Wendy James is the author of six books, including The Mistake (2012) and Out of the Silence, which won the 2006 Ned Kelly Award for Best First Crime fiction and was shortlisted for the Nita May Dobbie Award for women’s writing.  James writes about women’s lives: their domestic and interior lives as well as the bigger picture – the intersection of the political and the personal. She currently lives in Newcastle, New South Wales, with her husband and two of their four children.

HOW I GOT PUBLISHED

I actually started out writing short stories, so my first published work was a story that was published in the lovely literary journal, Voices, which was put out by the National Library of Australia, back in the mid nineties. A few months before the story was accepted I’d won a university short fiction competition, quite unexpectedly, and that gave me the confidence to reach for the stars — publication.  I was young and naive, and had no idea about the realities (and hard work!) of writing and publishing, and somehow imagined that everyone would be just as thrilled as I was  …  I remember feeling really silly when I asked the publisher’s assistant whether she’d enjoyed the story (who asks this?) and she replied rather tersely that she didn’t really know, as she was too busy typing up the damn manuscript to read it. This was back in the early-ish days of home computers, and my already outdated Mac didn’t have a word-processing doc that was compatible with the publisher’s computer. I’d written the story as a bit of an experiment – there’s a bit of playing around with language and technique – and to be honest, these days I find this story a little painful…

 There’s not quite any feeling to match the exhilaration of that first publication, but even now, almost twenty years later, and with a quite a few stories and articles and novels out there, I  still find it incredibly exciting to see my words in print, available for all the world to read. These days I do manage to resist the temptation to ask readers whether they enjoyed it …

HER LATEST BOOK 

 From the bestselling author of The Mistake comes a hauntingly powerful story about families and secrets and the dark shadows cast by the past.

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How I Got Published: Angela Marsons

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Angela Marsons lives in the Black Country with her partner, their bouncy Labrador and a swearing parrot.She first discovered her love of writing at Junior School when actual lessons came second to watching other people and quietly making up her own stories about them. Her report card invariably read “Angela would do well if she minded her own business as well as she minds other people’s”.

After years of writing relationship based stories (My Name Is and The Middle Child) Angela turned to Crime, fictionally speaking of course, and developed a character that refused to go away.

In September 2013 she was signed to Bookouture.com in a 4 book deal starting the DI Kim Stone series in SILENT SCREAM. The second instalment EVIL GAMES to be published 29th May 2015.

HOW I GOT PUBLISHED

I spent many years writing stories based in locations I didn’t know, featuring characters I thought would be popular and storylines that I thought would be appealing.  This garnered me some wonderful letters from Publishers.  However they all contained the word ‘unfortunately’ somewhere. Continue reading →

How I Got Published: Gail Bowen

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Gail-Bowen-

 GAIL BOWEN’s first Joanne Kilbourn mystery, Deadly Appearances (1990), was nominated for the W.H.Smith/Books in Canada Best First Novel Award, and A Colder Kind of Death (1995) won the Arthur Ellis Award for best crime novel; all 14 (and counting!) books in the series have been enthusiastically reviewed. In 2008, Reader’s Digest named Bowen Canada’s Best Mystery Novelist; in 2009, she received the Derrick Murdoch Award from the Crime Writers of Canada. Bowen has also written plays that have been produced across Canada and on CBC Radio. Now retired from teaching at the First Nations University, Bowen lives in Regina.

How I got published – Gail Bowen – November 6, 2014

I’m always uneasy talking about my writing career, because so much of it simply involved being in the right place at the right time.  In 1987, at the request of my friend Rob Sanders, now publisher of Greystone, I had co-written a novella titled 1919: The Love Letters of George and Adelaide for Western Producer Prairie Books. My writing partner had no interest in continuing to write, but I did. When my husband and I were doing our graduate degrees in English, mysteries were our summer reading.  I wrote Deadly Appearances and sent it to Rob, who was then with Douglas & McIntyre just at the moment that Douglas & McIntyre were beginning to publish mysteries.

         The manuscript was a mess, but Rob hired Jennifer Glossop an extraordinary editor and she whipped the novel into shape.  When D&M decided to cut their mystery line, I’d just completed the manuscript for A Colder Kind of Death. 

Rob Sanders called M&S and the next day James Adams phoned and asked to see the manuscript. I’ve been with M&S ever since.

Visit here and here for more on Gail Bowen.

How I Got Published: Rosemary Aubert

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Rosemary Aubert

 Rosemary Aubert is the author of sixteen books, among them the acclaimed Ellis Portal mystery series and her latest romantic thriller Terminal Grill.

Rosemary is a two-time winner of the Arthur Ellis Award for crime fiction, winning in both the novel and short-story categories. She appears in the recently-published popular short story collection Thirteen.

She is a member of the Crime Writers of Canada and the Mystery Writers of America. She conducts a much-in-demand writer’s retreat at Loyalist College in Belleville, Ontario each summer, as well as mentoring writing students who are studying at the School of Continuing Studies at the University of Toronto.

As a hobby, Rosemary studies math and science and has recently completed her second stint attending lectures at the International Summer School at Cambridge University in England. She intends to use some of this math knowledge in future works. Rosemary is an active member of the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto where she promotes Canadian writing and encourages other writers like herself.

How I Got Published

I have been writing and publishing since I was a teenager. The six Ellis Portal books have arisen from my love of my adopted city, Toronto, where I have now lived for almost 45 years.

I write about Ellis Portal, a man who was once a prominent member of the legal profession, in fact, a judge. He has, however, fallen on hard times and lived for a while in a shack he made out of cardboard in the wild valley of the Don River than runs through the city.As the years (and the novels about him) have gone on, he has been restored to his former legal life, although much altered by all he has been through. He is by no means a traditional sleuth but instead a man to whom fate is constantly handing problems that only he can solve, and the problems always involve murder or the suspicion of murder.

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How I Got Published: Jessica Treadway

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Jessica Treadway

Jessica Treadway’s novel Lacy Eye was published by Grand Central Publishing/Hachette Books in March 2015.  Her story collection Please Come Back To Me received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and was published by University of Georgia Press in 2010.  Her previous books are Absent Without Leave and Other Stories and her first novel, And Give You Peace.  She is a professor at Emerson College in Boston.

 How I Got Published

I began publishing my fiction thirty-one years ago, placing my first short story in The Hudson Review.  This was before platforms, before social media, and before e-readers; it was even before computers, at least for most people, I think.  That first submitted story was a typescript.  I published that story in 1984, another in 1986, another in 1990 and one in 1992, the year my first book of stories came out.  I was submitting stories all along; I believe that the 1990 publication, in The Atlantic, helped a great deal in getting me a contract to publish that first collection.

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How I Got Published: Kate Hilton

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I wanted to feature Kate Hilton in this series because her self published novel was picked up by a traditional publishing house.

Kate is the author of two novels, THE HOLE IN THE MIDDLE and JUST LIKE FAMILY (2017).  She is also the author of the non-fiction blog THE PEN PAL PROJECT.  For fun, Kate organizes stuff.  At the moment, she is on the Board of the Writers’ Trust of Canada, and is Deputy Control Freak for Authors for Indies, a grassroots event celebrating independent bookstores in Canada.  Kate lives in Toronto with her two sons, where she is working on her third novel.

I got published in three stages: I self-published, I published in Canada, and then I published in the US.  I still feel as though my own publishing story is unfolding, having entered the US market at the beginning of January.

Before you publish, as we all know, you have to write.  I wrote my book, The Hole in the Middle, while I was working full time.  It took me about three years to come up with a draft that I believed was worthy of publication.

Sadly, not everyone agreed with me.  I submitted my manuscript to 17 agents in Canada and the US.  Most never wrote back.  A few sent kind rejection letters.  Two agents asked for the full manuscript; one ultimately rejected it and the other broke off all communication with me.  In truth, the process was totally demoralizing and I thought seriously about giving up on it, since what had started as a midlife empowerment project was becoming the exact opposite.

I put the book away for a few months and licked my wounds.  Then, in January 2013, I took it out again and read it with fresh eyes.  I still liked it.  I still believed that it could find an audience.  But I knew that I would have to commit to self-publishing if I wanted to get it out into the world.

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How I Got Published: Phil Fragasso

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Last May, in honor of Chick-lit month I wrote a post titled Chick Lit: Can Men Write it? That post linked to an article that raved about the enormous success of such male romance writers as David Nicholls and Nicholas Sparks and also included three other male writers in this genre.Today, I’m happy to add Phil Fragasso to that list and feature him on the series How I Got Published.

 

Phil Fragasso sold his first article at the age of sixteen and has written continuously since then. After a career as a marketing executive, he left the corporate world a few years ago to focus on activities that were more fulfilling on a personal level and more contributory to the world around him. Today he focuses on writing and teaching. He’s often said “I live the American dream” and that is indeed how he feels. With a wonderful wife, two grown children, great friends and a couple of rambunctious Labrador retrievers, he stays very active and involved.

HOW I GOT PUBLISHED

 I’ve often said that my tragic flaw is having too many interests. I’ve written in a wide variety of genres and my most recent books have been nonfiction. My first published book, however, was a YA novel and I love the characters I created to this day. During the years when my kids were young and my career was taking off, I put fiction-writing aside and focused on books and articles related to business. I decided to return to my original love — in the form of commercial fiction — and committed myself to fiction.

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How I Got Published: Carrie Rubin

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Carrie Rubin

 

Carrie Rubin writes medical thrillers. Not surprising given that she’s a physician with a master’s degree in public health. Nor is it surprising that she delves into sensitive and controversial issues in her novels. In her latest thriller, Eating Bull, Carrie tackles bullying, fat shaming, food addiction and the food industry’s role in obesity.

How I Got Published

I wrote my first novel, The Seneca Scourge, over a fifteen-month period in 2003-2004. But as so often happens, life got in the way, and it wasn’t until 2011 I decided to get serious and move the process forward. I tightened my manuscript, read books on technique, and restarted the query process. Though I didn’t land an agent, I found a small press publisher, and in 2012 my first novel was published.

Since then, I’ve made writing a priority. I study the craft, attend conferences, and try to learn everything I can about the process.

My second novel, Eating Bull, a thriller that takes on the food industry, was recently published by ScienceThrillers Media, and I’m currently working on the second draft of my third novel.

As writers we often hear, “Don’t give up.” If we want to publish books, that’s good advice. That means overcoming plot-hole disasters, painful critiques, and endless rejections, all of which will hopefully inspire us to work harder and improve our technique.

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