The Good News, and the Bad

The good news is that my thriller publishers loved the proposal for The Babylonian Codex, so all systems are go with that book. Phew.

The bad news is that I still haven’t heard from the publishers of my Sebastian St. Cyr historical mystery series. My editor, Ellen, loved the proposal. So the problem isn’t the book. The problem is the economy.

Although Where Serpents Sleep hit significantly higher on all the lists than any of the previous books in the series, the actual number of sales didn’t increase. Now, given that the book came out last November in the midst of the horrific stock market crash, when everyone was focused on the economy and the election, and given that its performance on the lists indicates that its relative sales were better, I think the book actually did pretty well. Without a promotional budget, it always takes four to five books for a mystery series to catch on. We’re at the tipping point. I’ve worked so hard on this series, for so long, that I’m feeling kinda sick at this point. I heard back from my thriller publishers in two days. My Sebastian book’s proposal has been with Penguin for at least a month.


Fingers crossed and squeezing tight.

Nail Biting Time

I’m feeling somewhat like a wallflower, sitting around anxiously waiting to see if someone’s going to ask me to dance. Why? I currently have not one, but two book proposals out, one to each of my publishers. One proposal is for my third thriller, a book I’ve called The Babylonian Codex. The other is for the sixth Sebastian book. It’s an idea I love and starts with Sebastian’s friend, Gibson, buying the “resurrected” body of a young man and discovering that his illicit corpse was murdered. (I’d give you the title but, um, it doesn’t have one yet.)

What exactly is a book proposal? It’s the first three chapters/30-35 pages and a synopsis of the book, intended to give publishers a good feel for what the finished product will be like. Book proposals can be scary things to prepare, since so much rests on them (like whether the publisher will buy the book, and how much they’ll pay). Squishing the plot line and characters of a 400 page book down into a five page synopsis in a way that not only makes sense but sounds enticing is an art. And polishing those first three chapters into something sparkling and alluring when you haven’t written the rest of the book can be a challenge.

During the course of my writing career, I’ve only had one book proposal knocked back, but that experience was enough to scar me for life. I spent months researching and plotting out a second thriller I called The Bermuda Effect, and had written about a hundred pages when my editor said, “We don’t like this idea. Come up with something different.”

I learned a valuable lesson: don’t invest too much time and effort and heart into researching, plotting, and writing an idea that may not sell. And I learned another, slightly more cynical lesson: the less you give them, the less they can criticize. Dazzle them with smoke and mirrors, but don’t give them too much to think about.

But I still have a lot of time and heart invested in these two ideas. And the publishing environment right now is not good, so this is a bad time to be going out with one proposal, let alone two. So, yeah, I’m nervous. Stay tuned….