Claire Robyns - My Path to Publication

I've always read. A lot. Even at school, I'd average about 2 books a week (except at exams time) and these days there's just so much more to read in volume and variety - delicious!!

But, I never considered actually writing a book. This was before the wave of social media and online writing sites, and authors just seemed to glamorous, existing in another dimension. The task of writing a whole book was inconcievable, surely that required a talent that little ol' me could never aspire to.

Nowadays, of course, we get to chat with our favourite authors, we get to *see* them online and we get to realise they're just people like the rest of us, with large imaginations and a dash of talent and neverending perserverance.

But, anyway, I went on to have twins, we moved country and I took 6 months maternity leave. That would have been a good time to start writing. Huh. Then it was time for me to get back to work. And yes, with 6 months old twins and a household to run and a husband to manage and a full-time day job, that's when I decided to start writing my first book. Because, you know, I wasn't busy enough, lol.

I'd always enjoyed reading M&B and so that's what I decided to write. A full manuscript which I sent off to London, without a synopsis or query letter. Mmmm ... it came back in a big brown envelope, slightly worse for wear, with a nicely worded "R". I was devastated. Until I found the eHarlequin loop and started chatting with other aspiring authors and actually started learning a thing or two about this publishing business.

Still, the road wasn't easy. For seven years I wrote and submitted. I got some standard rejections, some lovely rejections with feedback, some requests for fulls and then some requests for revisions on submitted fulls. And I kept on going. The editors always loved my voice and writing, but the main reasons for the rejections always seemed to be : too little emotional depth, too many secondary characters, too much external plot.

After a couple of years, I did try to tailor my writing to increase the emotional complexity, to exterminate those secondary characters and work on plots. Seven years later I took a step back and looked at what I was doing, where I was going... I have so much respect for the M&B authors, it takes more than talent and imagination and focus to write category, it takes a special ability to understand the nuances of your line/s and write toward it without losing your voice and stories and creativity, and so many of them do this so, so well!!

At that point I was wrung out, I had no ideas left and no road to follow. My muse was drowned in self doubt and I gave up on getting published. But not on writing. That's when I wrote Betrayed, the book of my heart. I had no intention of submitting it. I didn't crawl through the websphere searching for what's hot and what's over, I didn't care what publishing houses are looking for, I just wrote and wrote and wrote what I wanted.

This story ended up at 650k words. A tome. But that was okay. It wasn't supposed to sell and I was the only person who had to love it.

About a year after I'd completed it, my wonderful critique group convinced me to send it out. So I thought, why not? I had nothing to lose, I wouldn't be devastated by rejections because this book had already achieved what I'd hoped for - I'd gotten my creativity back, my love for writing, for creating worlds and characters, I'd fallen back in love with my own words. Betrayed drew some interest from a publisher (suddenly I had an editor on the phone, chatting to me about revisions!! La, la, you should have heard the squealing in my house) but was eventually rejected. This story has all the grit and grime of life in medieval Scotland, I didn't blunt any corners even though I was quite aware it was perhaps a little too gritty for the current historical romance out there.

A few months after that, Carina Press was announced. Their slogan "...where no great story goes untold" reeled me in. And I thought I'd send Betrayed out there one last time before shoving it under the bed. Well, Carina Press loved it :)

As lame as it sounds, in the end, it was the story of my heart that became my debut book with Carina Press.

The road doesn't end there, though. There's still self-doubt, the possibilty of rejection by readers and also by my publishing house. The new world of social media and self-promotion that has to be navigated. But I'm loving every second of it. When a reader tweets that they've just read my book and liked it, I wear a smile for that whole day.

Erastes--my path to publication

Here's the first in a series of themed posts that each author will be blogging on from time to time, and for those of you who are just starting out, or who think "Oh, I'll never get published," I hope these posts give you hope--and show you just how different everyone's story is.

I'd always wanted to write, ever since I was a kid I was scribbling stories or telling myself adventures while I lay in bed. Sadly, although I had an artistic and encouraging mother, I didn't have the best teachers and my stories were often derided for being over fanciful or inaccurate. I remember once writing a story about a man dying of breast cancer (because I had read there were 300 cases for men against about 30,000 for women) and my teacher simply put a big red cross through the entire thing saying it was nonsense. I also remember writing about a car journey and watching the rain slide upwards on the windows (something I watched often myself,probably due to the wind pressure outside or some such reason) and again I was branded as having written nonsense. So I...kind of stopped writing.

But I didn't stop reading, and that probably kept the creative juices going through my late teens, and 20's and 30's. Unbeknownst to me, it was all just damming up and waiting to be released. I'd tried to write a couple of times in the 90's--spurred on by my mother who was herself writing a book, but nothing gelled--each book I started seemed derivative and I didn't know WHAT I wanted to write about.

In July 2003--and I wish I knew the exact date, because it was THAT kind of epiphany--I was cruising the internet prior to the release of the latest Harry Potter book. I was looking for any information about Severus Snape, who was at the time my favourite character, and completely by accident (just as well I didn't have "safe search" turned on, or my life may have been very different) I stumbled across a fanfiction community called the Snape Fuh-Q-Fest. My jaw dropped onto the desk. There were stories here about Snape...having...romantic liaisons with just about everyone in the Harry Potter Universe.

I'd not had a sheltered upbringing, but I'd never heard of fanfiction, and I'd never considered gay fiction as anything to read--but that day, reading story after story, I knew that this was what I wanted to write. In a matter of weeks I had written a 60,000 word novella about what happeend to Lucius Malfoy whilst not on the page of The Goblet of Fire whilst keeping entirely in canon. It was fun! It was exhilerating! It was...entirely a waste of time!

I realised that I couldn't do anything with this book--and so immediately began started on an original novel. I had first thought about converting the fanfic, but it wouldn't work, so I plumped for my comfort zone--Regency--and Standish, a gay Regency was born.

The trouble was (and probably just as well, or I might not have started it) that I didn't check to see if anyone was publishing gay romances before I wrote it, and when I finished it, I soon found out that--no, no-one really was.

I received rejections. Many, many MANY rejections. Some of them very encouraging and many personal ones which were spirit lifting, but generally I got the feeling that no one really knew what to do with a gay regency. There had been two that I knew of, but one (Gaywyck) had been published more than 20 years previously and nothing since, and the only other one (The Price of Temptation) was by a small publisher who wasn't taking on anything new. I contacted Scott and Scott who were the only people that I could see who were (self) publishing gay romance (because no one else would take it on) and received the same story from them--they went it alone because there was no other choice. It was all a bit disheartening.

So I put the book to one side, got on with writing: more fanfic (I stayed writing fanfic for about four more years) and a second original novel. Another thing I did in that fallow time was to write original short stories for submission to online websites, magazines and short story anthologies. It was with one of these short stories that I got my first sale and the euphoria still remains with me. It was a great way to build up that mythical and increasingly important "platform." With short stories, at least people were reading my words, learning who I was and what I wrote--visiting my website and learning about me.

After about a year a friend emailed me and said that she'd spotted a couple of gay historicals on Amazon, and "wasn't it about time I started trying to sell Standish?" I did as she suggested and in no time at all I sold it to PD Publishing - a small but hugely professional press to whom I will be forever grateful. In November 2006 Standish was published and it spurred me on to finish that second novel and to send it out and send it out and send it out until that also sold to Perseus Books. Now I have three novels, a handful of novellas and over 20 short stories in print and I'm one of the newest acquisitions for Carina who will be publishing my newest novella "The Muffled Drum" in July 2011.

If there's any moral to this story, it's simply: DON'T GIVE UP.Don't ever give up. Listen to advice, read read read all the information you can, learn as much about the business as possible - but don't give up. Believe in yourself and beleive in your product, even if you are writing something that no one is selling right now - you never know what's around the corner. Who says it won't be the next big thing? Who on earth would have predicted that Gay Historical Romances would be on the shelves? Who could have possibly guessed that zombie/classic mashups would be big, eh?