Success! Success! It Keeps Happening!

Here's another wonderful success story for you, from the author herself:


I was terrified to enter my first Secret Agent contest, submitting the intro to my Ancient Egypt historical fiction in February 2010. I thought it was good, but looking back... not so good. Around the same time, I started querying. 


But the feedback from the agents was all the same.


The writing is good, but it didn't grab me.


I was ready to throw my computer out the window when a writer friend and another agent gave me some stellar (albeit painful) feedback. I revised again and finished just in time to enter the first ever Baker's Dozen contest.


I got a partial bid! Then, a couple months later, another agent made an offer of representation!


A dream come true, right?


Not so much.


Before anyone skewers me, let me tell you I did jump up and down for joy and might have squealed in my classroom a few times. (Fortunately not when there were students around. That would have been awkward.) The offering agent wasn't one I'd actually queried, but instead someone another agent had passed my manuscript to. And while he had a number of sales, they weren't in historical fiction, and his client approach was the opposite of what I was looking for.


But after a year of querying, I so wanted an agent. Fortunately, my amazing writer friend gave me the smack upside the head I needed. (He was very nice about it).  I declined the agent's offer of representation and started a new book, even though I felt like banging my head against the nearest wall.


Fast forward to December 2011. I told myself Book #2 had to be finished for the 2nd Baker's Dozen Auction. I barely got it finished in time, and was accepted to the auction. Yay! Then I started querying, happily surprised at the number of requests coming in.


Then there was a bidding war for my book the day of the auction! Shortly after, I received an amazing email from Marlene Stringer asking for the full, and then came her amazing offer of representation.


And now the best news, hot off the press (or, er... Publisher's Marketplace)!


Stephanie Thornton's THE SECRET HISTORY, in which a theater tart-turned-Constantinople's premier courtesan must decide what's more important: pleasing the emperor who claims to love her or keeping the son he can never know about, to Ellen Edwards of NAL, at auction, in a three-book deal, for publication beginning in 2013, by Marlene Stringer of the Stringer Literary Agency (World English).


4 years. 2 books. Countless bowls of peanut butter chocolate ice cream.


I learned two things along this roller-coaster ride. First, be brave. You've got to put your work out there, even when the very thought makes you want to move to some distant mountaintop where you'll never have to see another human again. This is a great blog to do just that--Authoress runs the absolute best critique contests I've ever seen. And second, never, evergive up, even when you want to curl up and die. Rejection isn't permanent (and I'm pretty sure dying is).


~ Stephanie Thornton