An MSFV Success Story UPDATE

Author Susan Mann boasted a win during the 2014 BAKER'S DOZEN Auction, signing with Rena Rossner and finding her "happily ever after".  (The original post is HERE.)

I'm happy to share this update from her.  Enjoy!


I was fortunate to be chosen as one of the entries for Authoress’s Baker’s Dozen contest in November of 2014. Two agents bid on my contemporary romance about a librarian who gets mixed up with a spy. The fabulous Rena Rossner of the Deborah Harris Agency won the full manuscript. Within a week of sending it to her, she e-mailed me to say she loved it and wanted to represent me. I was thrilled and dumbfounded.

I accepted Rena’s offer and after several rounds of editing, she submitted the manuscript to editors in April of 2015. Over the course of the next few months, we received some very nice rejections.

Fast forward to October 2015. I flew to California to visit my parents for a few days. During the two-hour flight, I was incommunicado for the first time in six months.

The plane landed, I switched my phone off of airplane mode, and it was immediately under assault. I had an e-mail, texts, DM’s, missed calls, and a voicemail, all from Rena. I nearly dropped my phone as I tried to deplane, listen to the voicemail, and read the DMs all at the same time. I found a place to sit in the terminal and was about to call Rena when my phone rang. She’d decided to give it one more try before she went to bed. (She lives in Jerusalem, so time difference.)

We’d gotten an offer. And it was for print and e-book! I was floored and ecstatic and stunned. The next step was to let the editors she hadn’t heard back from yet know we’d received an offer. She gave them a deadline to get back to us if they were interested.

I did the only thing I could do. I celebrated with a Double-Double and fries at the In-N-Out ten minutes from the airport.

I had a lovely visit with my parents and drove the 90 minutes back to the airport a few days later. In the time I couldn’t look at my phone—yup, you guess it—we received a second offer. (I will always have warm feelings toward that particular airport.)

Over the course of the next week, Rena worked her magic and negotiated a marvelous three-book deal with Kensington Publishing under their Zebra Shout imprint. It’s a privilege to work with my wonderful editor, Esi Sogah. The first book, The Librarian and the Spy, will release on April 25, 2017. Books 2 and 3 of The Librarian and the Spy series will follow.

It has been an incredible journey so far and I look forward to when my novels are out in the world. I’m forever grateful for the time, energy, expertise, and passion Authoress invests in the contests she runs. We, as a community of aspiring writers, are blessed to have her championing us.