It's official!

Wednesday afternoon, I signed a contract with Skyhorse Publishing in New York to publish my second novel, Fog of Dead Souls. I'm really thrilled. Even my wretched experience with one of the nasty viruses going around can't dampen my enthusiasm.

There was no bidding war for my book. In fact, 56 or so editors had read it and most had really liked it, but just not enough. Too dark, said one. Not dark enough, said the next. Loved the characters but didn't like the plot, said a third. Loved the plot but didn't like the characters, said a fourth. This had gone on for 18 months, but my agent never lost her enthusiasm or her energy behind the book. "It just takes the right one," she said.

And Skyhorse is that one. As a college mate remarked, now I'm a real novelist. Actually, I started feeling like a "real" novelist, when I started Fog. I'd finished one novel and moved right on to the second. I just love writing them.

I'm excited that my book may have a chance to make it big. I'll keep you posted.

My new books are out and available!

I'm very excited to announce the publication of two new books. The first, The Color of Longing, is a novel I completed in 2009. I had had such a good time writing it that I immediately moved on to writing a second novel (the one that is in negotiation with the publisher in New York). Then last summer I decided I would self-publish Longing, just get it out there and see what can happen. It took me a while to edit it, get it proofread, make some changes, proofread again. But mostly I couldn't seem to paint the image that I had in mind for the cover. Then in November, that happened and I moved ahead.

Here's a brief synopsis:

What’s a guy to do when the woman he’s loved for 15 years asks for help leaving her alcoholic husband? And what if that husband is his best friend? In this unconventional romance, artist Jake Logan makes a painful and inevitable choice that sets him adrift. Crisscrossing the country with his cat Sadie, he seeks answers to his quest from several helpful strangers, but it isn’t until he has a deep spiritual encounter with himself that he begins to find his true way home.

The second book is a how-to book called Sober Play: Using Creativity for a More Joyful Recovery. It promotes using creative self-expression in any number of forms and media to have a more joyful life. This has long been an important part of my own recovery from alcoholism and I wanted to share all I've learned and all I believe about the connection between creativity and recovery.

Both books are available on amazon and kindle and through me at jill@jillkellyauthor.com. If you read one or the other and like it, I hope you'll review the book on amazon for me. Happy reading!

The contract stage of traditional publishing

On my flight to Florida last week, I read the contract my agent forwarded from Skyhorse Publishing, which is interested in buying my second novel, Fog of Dead Souls. In fact, I read it twice. It was pretty accessible in language, and I made a list of about 10 questions for my agent: phrases and sentences I didn't understand and one issue I wanted to reword concerning when the rights to the book revert to me.

My great agent, Andrea Somberg, had made some revisions of her own to protect me and I agreed with all of them. Yesterday we had a good conversation and she will send our revisions on to them.  She doesn't believe they'll give us all we want but we'll see. The negotiations continue.

At the same time, I'm self-publishing two books through CreateSpace, a much faster way to get things out. It's going to be interesting to compare the two processes and their results. I'll keep you posted.

self-publishing adventures

I've been in the midst of self-publishing two books these past weeks. I had hoped to have both books out and about for my workshop with Karen Casey next week in Naples, Florida, but all my efforts have been insufficient to pull it off. Feeling both a bit frustrated and knowing that it's not the end of the world by any means.

While I have dealt with CreateSpace before for clients, this is the first time it has involved my own work. I am impressed with a lot about their system. The customer service folks are almost instantaneously available by phone. I've called four times with questions and had somebody on the line who could help me within 10 seconds. Courteous, friendly. Unfortunately I had a glitch with both cover and "guts" of the book that were unusual and so it took 9 extra days to resolve the color of the cover and the technical issue (involving the em dash), and only today was I able to finally approve the novel and complete the pages and move it on to Kindle as well as amazon. The novel, The Color of Longing, should be available on both starting tomorrow.  
And I just ordered some sent to Florida and some to my house for a book launch next month.

The other book, Sober Play: Using Creativity for a More Joyful Recovery, is still in the design stages. We're awfully close but not close enough to complete all the process before I leave on Wednesday morning. I knew it was ambitious to try to get two books out in the early part of the New Year (the holidays were a hold-up) but it was worth a try.

Negotiating and learning about the publishing contract

I came back from my New Year's writing retreat to the next phase of the traditional publishing adventure: negotiating the contract.

There's a complicated scale for royalties for hardcover and paperback and ebooks, depending on how many you sell (higher royalty the more you sell) but it isn't great under any circumstances. Publishers only really make money with volume sales. They sell the books to bookstores at a 40% or greater discount off the list price and incur all costs of insurance and shipping and buying the books back if they don't sell. A book like mine, by an unknown, unproven author, is a big gamble and they're only willing to invest so much. Maybe it will take off, maybe it will flop. Of course, they want it to be a big seller and so do I, but that depends on so many of the stars aligning just right, so many unpredictable factors.

In the short run, I could probably make as much money by self-publishing as I will initially get from the publisher so it's a gamble for me too. My hope, and theirs, is that their possibilities for exposing it to a wider public in ways that self-publishing can't do will garner us more readers.

At the end of the week's conversations with my agent, I told her I wanted to pursue this with the publisher for the experience of it. To have a traditional publisher and go through all the steps and see what happens. To be honest, this is already farther than I ever thought I'd get. So it's thrilling no matter what!

Story magic

Today is the last day of the 8-day writing retreat. With no big project to work on, I floundered the first few days, not knowing how to structure my time or direct my energies. But I fell into a comfortable rhythm of drafting 2-3 poems a day and writing a fictional prompt. Some of the poems have real potential and that pleases me and I have liked being back in the kind of thinking that poetry gets me into. I become more observant of what's going on around me as I am always looking for poem ideas: a snippet of conversation, light on a tree trunk, a face seen in a store.

The prompts have been less successful though fun to write. My good friend Bridget gave me a Storymatic box of prompts for Christmas. It has two kinds of cards, characters and situation, and they've been fun to fool with. Then yesterday, as I was writing a prompt that needed to incorporate a parade and a smoker, story magic happened. About the fifth sentence, something in my creative self began to tingle and a character showed up, one with great possibility for something more, something larger, maybe the next novel. I don't know yet but my excitement while writing a few more sentences and then taking a few notes of possibility was palpable. Even better, I woke up thinking about the prompt this morning and what different things could happen next.

And this morning I wrote a different prompt and had the same tingling, the same excitement. I don't know if the two prompts are connected or are two separate stories or are even really stories, but something has opened up and it's way cool!

Resting in the pause

I am on day 2 of an 8-day retreat at Aldermarsh, a retreat center on Whidbey Island north of Seattle. Large parts of each of my books have been written here and I usually come in mid-project with clear direction for what to do each day. This time is different. I completed a draft of my current novel last August and it is with beta-readers. I completed a small how-to book earlier this month and it is with a proofreader. So I am in the pause.

I am not someone who is usually comfortable in the pause. Rest and relaxation are not easy for me, and even though I say I want them and sometimes even yearn for them, I don't know how to be in them. I'm more about getting things done, about being engaged in some mental or physical activity.

So I'm letting myself do whatever occurs to me next. Yesterday I worked on a proofing project for my novel, The Color of Longing, that will come out next month. Then I read through a notebook of old prompts. I am hoping that my next novel idea will find me while I am here. My three drafted novels all came out of ideas in that notebook, but this time no such luck. I think I have used those up.

So today I wrote a new prompt and wrote a poem and began to revise some poems that I wrote two years ago. I also spent some time starting a list of creative project ideas for next year, both in painting and writing. It has been a good day, although I still miss being in the middle of a book.