Tag Archives: How I Got Published

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: 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: Eileen Schuh

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Eileen Schuh

Eileen Schuh has published two adult Science Fiction novellas: SCHRÖDINGER’S CAT and her new near-future release, DISPASSIONATE LIES. She also has authored three novels in her gritty and contemporary young adult BackTracker series: THE TRAZ, FATAL ERROR and FIREWALLS. THE TRAZ is also available in a School Edition.

 She is both a traditionally published author (with WolfSinger Publications and Imajin Books) and self-published.

 Schuh, born Eileen Fairbrother in Tofield, Alberta lives in Canada’s northern boreal forests and draws her inspiration from the wilderness, her grandchildren, family, and friends, and her adopted community of St. Paul, Alberta.

How I Got Published

I wanted to be a published novelist since I learned to read at age three. Half a century of living intervened before I would make good on that dream. It all started when I quit smoking.

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How I Got Published: J.E. Forman

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J.E. Forman Really Dead

Once upon a time I was a relatively sane television producer. I switched from cameras to keyboards and added screenwriter and romance novelist (under a pseudonym) to my list of credits. Really Dead is my first mystery.

How I got published

 Dying played a big part in the birth of my mystery. I’d been following the usual write a mystery-query-heavy sigh after getting rejections route for several years and I was just about to give up the dream of getting a mystery published when my fate took a detour.

 My mother died and I needed to get my hair dyed before her funeral. My hairdresser squeezed me into his over-scheduled day and, while he was putting the glop on my head, introduced me to the other customer he was working on at the same time. She was sitting in the chair next to mine, wearing a plastic bag on her head. The woman and I did the polite “what do you do” conversation and I almost slid out of my chair. The woman with the bag on her head was the then owner/publisher of an independent Canadian publishing house that had a very successful mystery line. It wasn’t the time or place for me to start pitching a story … but I left the salon with a personal connection and an invitation to submit.

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How I Got Published: John McFetridge

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John McFetridge

John McFetridge is the author of four novels in the  The Toronto Series as well as Black Rock, set in Montreal in1970. The second Montreal novel, A Little More Free, is set in 1972 and will be published in the fall of 2015. He was a writer on the CTV/CBS cop show, The Bridge. He currently lives in Toronto with his wife and two sons.

“Like (Elmore Leonard, McFetridge is able to convincingly portray flawed figures on both sides of the law. ” – Publishers Weekly

How I Got Published

After almost ten years of part-time attendance I graduated from Concordia in 1990 with an English degree (and a minor in Creative Writing) and I moved to Toronto and worked on movie sets. Almost ten years later when my wife and I had kids I became a stay-at-home dad and decided to try and make some money writing. The only kind of writing that seemed to be paying was non-fiction but I had an idea for a novel – I was still trying to figure out Toronto (I still am) and why so many people come to the city and a crime novel seemed like the best way to get into as many different neighbourhoods as possible.

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How I Got Published: Melodie Campbell

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Melodie Campbell

Billed as Canada’s “Queen of Comedy” by the Toronto Sun (Jan. 5, 2014), Melodie Campbell achieved a personal best when Library Digest compared her to Janet Evanovich.

Winner of nine awards, including the 2014 Derringer (US) and the 2014 Arthur Ellis (Canada) for The Goddaughter’s Revenge (Orca Books), Melodie has over 200 publications, including 100 comedy credits, 40 short stories, and seven novels.

Melodie got her start writing stand-up.  In 1999, she opened the Canadian Humour Conference. These days, she is the Executive Director of Crime Writers of Canada.

HOW I GOT PUBLISHED

The Start Short and Build method

By Melodie Campbell

I got my start writing short stuff.  Specifically, I wrote comedy (standup and a syndicated humour column.)  From there I had some short stories published in small magazines.  That led to short stories in bigger magazines that paid more (Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, and Star Magazine – yes, the supermarket tabloid!)  I had 100 comedy credits and 30 short stories published before I wrote and sold my first novel.

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How I Got Published: Julieann Dove

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Julieann Dove is a contemporary romance writer who lives in Virginia with her husband and five children. That’s right… Five children! She loves to mess outside in her flower beds, and work on her many quilting projects. Cooking new recipes is another joy of hers. “Although, when you’ve got five children, it’s difficult to please everyone’s palette.” A majority of thumbs up gets the recipe in the “keeper” file. At night, you’ll find her in the corner of her messy desk, writing about love. The Amy Series is one of her favorites to write.

HOW I GOT PUBLISHED

I took a hiatus from my job of 20 years and decided to write a book. I have always been a writer at heart, but never took the time to seriously calculate a novel. At the end of a few months, I’d written two books. It was as if someone turned on a spigot and out poured all these words…and people…with problems and solutions. I was never so happy. I joined RWA and received notifications of writing contests. Of which I entered my fair share! What I got in return was valuable feedback. I incorporated the suggestions into my books and sent out queries to agents–about fifty to a hundred or so! I had a few requests, of which fizzled out with some light criticism for what to change. Close calls but no cigars.

January 2015 I received word from a small publishing company that they wanted to place my book on their list. I worked all year striving for this to happen. One month before publication, we separated ways. I quickly formulated a plan to self-publish it and did so this last February…the date it was supposed to release! I never set out to self-publish, but I’m enjoying the freedom that comes with it. The second in the series releases May 1st. I’ve since contracted with another agency to release a standalone in June, and am in negotiation to publish a YA contemporary.

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