My Journey to the Call...Part 1

My Journey to “the call”… PART ONE

For those of you who haven't heard my latest BIG news (and I don't know how you've missed it--since I've been shouting it from the rooftops!)...I recently received "the call" from Dorchester Publishing NY who will be publishing my paranormal romantic suspense book entitled Courting Demons in early/mid 2011. To read more about this news, check out my personal author blog at www.kerribookwriter.blogspot.com.

I want to celebrate my wonderful news by sharing my story with you. I'm also giving away tons of writer related prizes as a bonus for those of you who take the journey with me!

So, here's my story.

In 1990, I wrote my very first novel entitled Summer Sisters. It was a young adult romance about a character (based on myself since I was a young adult at the time) and my best friend taking a trip to Boston and falling in love with rock stars! Twenty years later, I’m still writing novels about falling in love but I hope that I’ve improved drastically since that first book (that manuscript printed on dot matrix printer paper is currently residing in box in my freezing cold garage).

Around 5 years later, I’d written my first “real” novel entitled Naked Eye. It is a legal thriller featuring a young southern woman who works in a law firm and witnesses a murder. While I never witnessed a murder (thank goodness), I had begun my 15 year career working as a Paralegal in law firms. Do you sense a theme here?

I thought this book was going to make me rich and famous. I liked to dream of being the female version John Grisham and that my book was not only going to be published but made into a hit movie (ie: The Firm). Oh, boy! Not only was I terribly misguided in my dreams but when I recently attempted to read this book to see if it was submission worthy with some fine tuning…I made myself sick. It stinks! I can’t even believe I ever thought it was good (sigh).

Nonetheless, I started out by researching how to get published by buying books on the topic. I tried to figure out this query letter thing and I started submitting them to agents in the Writer’s Market book. I soon began to receive rejection letter after rejection letter. Yes, folks, back then it was ALL done via real paper letters and good old snail mail. If you think it is a slow process now—you should have endured those weeks and months. No one was really taking electronic submissions back then. Needless to say, it was a long and gruesome process and yielded me many sad and frustrating moments.

As any newbie writer might do…I quickly lost faith in my work. What I didn’t know then was that I wasn’t really submitting a proper query to the right people and that I desperately needed work on my sales pitch!

Of course, I also needed major work on my book (I know this now) but at the time, I couldn’t even get an agent or editor to look at the work in the first place!

So, today I’m offering up the first prize in my “Journey to the Call” prize pack. In order to be eligible to win the prize pack, you must follow my 3 part blog post journey (every Monday for the next 3 weeks) here at the Book Boost Blog. You’ll gain entry to the prize pack drawing only if you post a comment or question each week during the week of the post.

The entire prize pack bundle is designed to help “pre-published” authors who are still seeking that elusive “call”. The first set of prizes to be added to the bundle are as follows:

• A book entitled: How to Write Attention Grabbing Query & Cover Letters;
• (1) free critique of your query letter; and
• (1) free copy of my first published book entitled Miss Taken

Next week, I’ll continue sharing my journey and announce the second set of prizes to be added to the prize pack bundle.

In the meantime, share with me questions about query letters or tell us how your journey began! I look forward to hearing from you!