It’s been a while since I posted, mainly because I’ve been busting my guts working on the anticipated release of Shadows May Fall. It’ll be two years this month since I first started writing it, so needless to say I’m ready to be done with it once and for all. I learned how to successfully put a print book together, a first for me, and just yesterday I was sitting down with my red pen in hand making what I expected to be the final corrections.
Then, I got a voice message on my phone. It was from a publisher I had submitted to back in April. I sent them a query just as I was straddling the fence about self-publishing and they were the only traditional publisher I directly submitted to (I did the agent thing for about a minute in early days) and when the summer came along I proceeded with getting things together to get this book ready for publication, including posting it on Wattpad and learning how to make a dead tree book. I even switched up the pen name — originally I had a brand new one, but when I decided to go indie I made the decision to use one I had previously published romances under.
Needless to say, after ten months, I was pretty surprised to get the call. I thought about it for the afternoon and decided I would send them the full manuscript.
A bit of irony here: my decision to go with this publisher or go indie was prompted by a session I attended on traditional publishing vs self publishing in which the editor I submitted to was one of the panelists for trad publishing (the other was one of their own authors who also self-published.)
So, just over a month before my planned publication date, I’m hitting the brakes. Barring the publisher giving an auto-no after I told them it was currently on Wattpad (though having an established readership might actually help from a business perspective,) the publication date is suspended indefinitely.
What this means:
a) They’ll offer a contract, and publication will be at least a year from the date of signing.
b) They won’t offer a contract, and the publication date will most likely be next winter (depending on how long it takes them to read and whether I have to nudge.)
I could have said it wasn’t available and proceeded to go indy, but they’re a great publisher (my Christmas stocking was filled with three of their books this year), they have a YA imprint, and they publish the sort of thing I write. I had planned to submit something else to them down the road, but I assumed that Shadows May Fall and its subsequent books were all no-go.
Normally this is something I would keep under my hat, but I’ve had some readers ask specifically about a print edition and I had promised 2017, so I figured it would only be fair to be upfront.
I’ll be sitting at the computer all weekend trying to put together the manuscript. It’s been AGES since I had to whip something up for submission. Then I have to scour everywhere for mentions of a publication date.
After that, I wait, and I get to work on something new — because that, my friends, is the whirlwind that is publishing.
Annemarie Hartnett 