Kitty's Book is Out!

(Kitty) At long last, I have reached the next stage of my journey - I have a book for sale! Woo-hooo!!!

Little Miss Lovesick took a long twisty road to get here. A very long time ago - 1997 or so - it was a proposal for an anthology Tyndale House Publishers was putting together. The editor passed, but asked to see more work from me.

I met a Silhouette editor at a Romance Writers of America conference a couple years later and pitched her the idea. She wanted to see it, but by the time I had the proposal polished and ready to send, she wasn't with Silhouette anymore.

I decided that pursuing Harlequin/ Silhouette was still a good idea and did some more work on the story, trying to figure out what line it most closely matched. I read a bit of it to my friends Lauraine Snelling and Kathleen Wright when we were off on a writing week together. They were polite but not overwhelmed. That said to me that it wasn't a very interesting story. Maybe I should just forget it.

Then Lauraine asked me if I had heard of chick lit. I hadn't, so the three of us did some online and bookstore research. I was gobsmacked! This was exactly the kind of voice I'd write in if I didn't have to write towards the expectations of one publisher or another. The next day I rewrote the first chapter into more ore less what you see here in Little Miss Lovesick and read it for Lauraine and Kathleen. THey laughed so much! I was thrilled!

Then Lauraine picked up her cell phone and called her agent. "I'd like you to read something," she said. I didn't know if I was going to throw up or pass out! But chick lit was reaching its zenith and passing away. Though the agent received two "we almost bought it" replied from editors, all the publishing houses we sent it to passed.

And for the last seven years, the book has languished on my computer.

Then I heard about digital self-publishing. Other authors were giving it a try without a publisher behind them, and they were succeeding in varying degrees. I figured, what's the worst that can happen? The book isn't doing me any good on my computer. So when I finished my master's degree in June of this year, I dusted off the book and did a little more editing based on the comments of the editors who had passed on it years before.

I put my entrepreneurial hat back on and filed a DBA ("doing business as") to work as Daydreamer Entertainment, the publisher of Little Miss Lovesick. And voila! A lot of hours later, I had a book! Out in the marketplace! Yay! As a co-owner of our little business, John did the cover design. Lovely, isn't it?

Right now, the ebook is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Smashwords. Smashwords will help me get it into the Apple iBookstore, Kobo and Sony. I'm working on getting it into All Romance eBooks and XinXii this week. Then I'll start working on the print version, which I hope will be available by December 1.

If you don't have an ereader, you can download an ereader app to your smart phone, your iPad or your PC or Mac computer. Or you can check back here or at my web site or on my Facebook page to find out when it is available in print. :)

So that's the story. My career has taken a new direction and I'm loving it! I'm exhausted, but I'm happier than I've been in years! Thank you, God!