January, 2006 News

January 24, 2006

My agent and I spoke by phone and divided up the work: I would email my remaining questions to John Helfers and discuss those directly with him, and my agent would email the suggested contract changes and handle that end.

January 20, 2006

I contacted a few published author friends, some of whom published with Five Star to get their take on the publisher, their reputation, and what it was like to work with the company. Again, I asked them to keep the news to themselves. I got lots of useful information, mostly positive, and decided to accept the deal. I purchased my website name. Also, my agent emailed answers to most of my questions to me today.

January 17, 2006

At 11 am yesterday I received an email from John Helfers saying Tekno Books would like to purchase my novel, Basket Case, for their Five Star Mystery line. I danced upstairs from my basement writing room and announced the news to my husband. After seven long years of pursuing a fiction-writing career, I'm finally going to be published in novel-length fiction! Then I called my mother, my sister and my daughter in college, who were all thrilled. I told them to keep quiet about it because I hadn't signed the contract yet. Today, I sent the contract attached to Helfers's email to my agent for review, along with a list of questions, and told John that I'd done so. Now I'm twiddling thumbs!

Note: I submitted Basket Case on November 30, shortly after signing with my agent, Barret Neville, and discussing the book with Tekno editor, Denise Dietz, both of whom I met at the Colorado Gold Conference in Denver, CO in September, 2006.