Guest Author Post: Jennifer Estep's Road to Publication and Book Giveaway

Jennifer Estep filling in while KB is away living it up on her Caribbean cruise...

Greetings and salutations! First of all, I want to say thanks to Katiebabs for having me on the blog today. Thanks so much, KB!

As some of you may know, I’m the author of the Bigtime superhero paranormal romance series – Karma Girl (2007), Hot Mama (2007), and Jinx (2008). Plus, I also write the Elemental Urban fantasy series, with three books coming out in this year – Spider’s Bite (which came out in February), Web of Lies (which debuts on May 25), and Venom (October). I’ve been asked to talk a little bit about my road to publication here today, so here goes.

I’m a slush pile baby. Yep, that’s it, that’s the big secret to how I got published – through the slush pile.

My story is probably like that of a lot of other writers. Thinking that I was the second coming of J.R.R. Tolkien, I wrote a really crappy epic fantasy book. But I learned a little something from it and wrote a second epic fantasy book that wasn’t quite as crappy, but was still pretty bad. Altogether, I wrote six books – mostly fantasies along with a cozy murder mystery – before I penned my seventh book, which was a paranormal romance called Karma Girl about sexy superheroes, evil ubervillains, and a sassy gal looking for love. Karma Girl was the book that finally sold to a publisher, about seven years after I wrote that first really crappy epic fantasy book. So I was definitely not an overnight success by any stretch of the imagination.

Of course, I wasn’t just writing during those seven years. Realizing that I knew nothing about publishing, I joined Romance Writers of America and started educating myself on how to write a query letter, how to write a synopsis, etc. I went to some writers’ conferences, pitched to some editors, and generally did everything that a wanna-be author does – including spending way too much money on postage.

I don’t remember exactly when I started sending out query letters or what books they were even for. But I sent hundreds of those suckers out – and I got a ton of rejections in return. Seriously, I stopped counting somewhere around the 400 rejection letter mark. But I kept writing books and sending out query letters, and eventually, I started getting more and more requests for sample chapters and then finished manuscripts. Finally, I started getting offers from some agents who wanted to represent Karma Girl. I signed with an agent and a few months later, she sold Karma Girl.

Huzzah! I thought. I’ve finally made it, and it’ll be smooth sailing from here on out. Fame and fortune will soon be mine, with world domination to follow. ;-)

Um, not really. Not at all, actually. Just because you sell a book to a publisher doesn’t mean that you’re going to become the next Nora Roberts. In fact, I think that it gets tougher after you sell your first book, because now your book is out there competing with all the others on the shelves for readers’ time, attention, and money – and everyone else’s book is just as entertaining and well-written as yours is.

But I’d gotten a little taste of success, and I wanted more – much, much more. So in between working on the books in my Bigtime series, I started thinking about what I wanted to write next, and I remembered a story about an assassin that I had tried to write a few times. Remember those crappy epic fantasies novels? Well, this was one of them. By this point, I realized that I was pretty good at writing contemporary fantasy books, so I basically started from scratch and wrote my assassin story as a first-person urban fantasy. The result was Spider’s Bite.

I sent it to my agent, who sent it out to an editor. The editor loved the first half of the book but – and this is a big BUT – but thought that the second half needed to be completely redone. So the editor and I had a long conversation on the phone one day about what she thought was wrong with my book. And you know what? She was right about pretty much everything. So I sucked it up and basically threw away the last half – about 50,000 words – of Spider’s Bite and rewrote it. And the book was so much better for it. The editor thought so too because she bought the book, and the Elemental Assassin series was born.

Spider’s Bite was released in February, and the second book in the series, Web of Lies, comes out on May 25. So there you have it – my rocky road to publication … twice.

I want to wrap up by offering a few words of encouragement to all those aspiring writers out there. I won’t lie to you – publishing is a tough business to break into and an even tougher one to stay in for any length of time. But if you keep writing, if you keep educating yourself, if you keep getting better with every book, it’ll happen for you too. Maybe not overnight, but someday, you’ll get the call. So just keep on keeping on until that day gets here – it might just be sooner than you realize. ;-)

Got questions? I’ll answer them in the comments.

Interested in reading Web of Lies? Jennifer has one copy to give away for those readers in US and Canada. Just leave a question or comment her for Jennifer by Friday 5/28 for your chance to win!

You might know me as the Spider, the most feared assassin in the South. I’m retired now, but trouble still has a way of finding me. Like the other day when two punks tried to rob my popular barbecue joint, the Pork Pit. Then there was the barrage of gunfire on the restaurant. Only, for once, those kill shots weren’t aimed at me. They were meant for Violet Fox. Ever since I agreed to help Violet and her grandfather protect their property from an evil coalmining tycoon, I’m beginning to wonder if I’m really retired. So is Detective Donovan Caine. The only honest cop in Ashland is having a real hard time reconciling his attraction to me with his Boy Scout mentality. And I can barely keep my hands off his sexy body. What can I say? I’m a Stone elemental with a little Ice magic thrown in, but my heart isn’t made of solid rock. Luckily, Gin Blanco always gets her man . . . dead or alive.