I’ve searched for and read an awful lot of these path to publication posts, and I never believed I’d have an excuse to write one. But now I do. 

It’s been a whole week since I signed an offer memo from Harlequin, and by the time I post this, I will also have a signed contract. They plan to publish my yet to be retitled trade paperback and eBook in September 2023. 

 So here is my micro memoir about my road to publication, or at least to a book deal. Stop reading right now if you’re bored to tears by the minutiae of other people’s writing adventures.

A long time ago, I was working as a social worker, and decided that it was time for a career change, so I enrolled in a post graduate certificate in journalism at UTS. I did well, especially in my feature writing subject with the wonderful Peter Manning, former director of Radio National. I also did an introductory fiction subject with author and filmmaker Julia Leigh, who was equally kind and talented. She graciously described my efforts as ‘wildflower’ writing, but they were laboured and messy. 

 There was a copywriter in my fiction class called Corinne Pentecost, who was a brilliant writer, far outshining the rest of us. She should have become a great Australian short story writer and novelist. She told me that it was important to her that she made something of this opportunity because she was already in her late forties or early fifties. She died of cancer before she had a chance to fully realise her dreams. Thinking of lovely, clever Corinne always reminds me that my time is finite, and I need to use it well.

Peter Manning thought I had the potential to make it as a journalist, but those were the days before the internet had really taken off, before mummy blogging became a springboard to a writing career. I had two young daughters, a mortgage, a credit card debt and two or three jobs. The path into journalism then was via volunteering or unpaid internships, and I didn’t have time. I published a number of freelance articles and gave up. It was too hard, but I maintained a passion for writing, and thought fiction might be my way in.

 I’d discovered there was nothing I loved more than a writing course. I did a postgraduate certificate in fiction writing at another university, which wasn’t entirely a waste of time, but wasn’t that helpful either. I attended numerous short courses, including those offered by Writing NSW and the Australian Writer’s Centre, which were helpful.  

One day I met Jo Riccioni at a Kathryn Heyman workshop. Jo was already winning short story competitions and went on to publishing success with one novel and another two in the wings. We formed a writer’s group with Suzanne Brown, from my university course and her friend Sam Milton. Suzanne and Sam are writing their first novels. The writer’s group has been an invaluable source of support, feedback and friendship for all of us, with writing retreats in the Blue Mountains most years.

Jo and I attended the inaugural Faber Academy course in 2011, with Kathryn Heyman and James Bradley. I recommend the Faber Academy to anyone who is serious about their writing. It still wasn’t enough for me though. Agents and publishers came to listen to us read extracts from our works in progress, and nobody expressed interest in mine, which was unsurprising to me, as it was a tangled, miserable mess. I realise now that I’d conflated literary fiction with misery fiction, so no wonder it didn’t catch anyone’s attention. Even my beloved writers’ group struggled to wade through my dense prose. I managed to publish fiction in a couple of anthologies and in Tracks surfing magazine, but I placed nowhere in too many competitions to count.

My breakthrough came when I attended a writing workshop at Writing NSW with the fabulous Anne Gracie, romance writer extraordinaire. Through Anne I discovered the incredibly well organised and supportive Romance Writers of Australia and felt inspired to try my hand at writing a romance. After all, I’d always loved reading them.

I learned that my genre writing voice was far more engaging than my ‘literary’ one. For the first time, my characters had embryonic shape and form, and I could write believable dialogue, at least some of the time. I started in 2019 with a short story entry for RWA which didn’t place and turned it into a novel, writing on my commute to work and at weekends.  

You’ve probably read that that the difference between ‘the queen died and then the king died,’ and ‘the queen died and then the king died of grief,’ is that the second statement constitutes a story. So making one story event lead to another, and every event the result of characters acting according to their individual quirks and traits led to a novel. It doesn’t sound like rocket science, but it took me years and years to work it out. The other thing that I drew on, especially with dialogue, was a series of drama improvisation classes a performer called Nick Fury ran for free for a group of friends in Sydney’s Glebe way back in the eighties, where every response built on the story offered by someone else in the group, no matter how absurd that story was becoming. Basically I discovered that writing can be FUN.

 By 2019, my husband’s business was doing well, and we agreed that we could afford for me to leave my job and focus on writing and on being a stay at home granny. I recognise that I’m immensely privileged to be in this position. The grandkids are my biggest and most welcome distraction now. When making the decision, it helped when a couple of friends took my arms and walked me across an actual watershed on a cycling trip in the UK in 2019, making me promise to follow through and take this big step I was so afraid of.

Leaving paid work allowed me the time to finish my novel and send it to freelance editor Alexandra Nahlous for a structural edit once I’d incorporated the invaluable feedback from my writer’s group. A structural edit is about fixing up the ‘bones’ of a story with regard to characterisation, coherence, consistency, etc. It’s different to a copyedit, which is more about grammar and punctuation. 

I can’t speak too highly of Alex. She’s professional, thorough, warm and encouraging, and I love working with her. I mean I really love working with her. I thank my lucky stars that her name came up when I googled freelance editors. She asked if she could call me a day or two into her edits, and I panicked and thought she’d say my work wasn’t ready for a structural edit, and she wanted to do a manuscript assessment instead. A manuscript assessment is a roadmap for a novel that isn’t yet ready for a structural edit, and I was anxious that what I’d sent her was too rough. 

I was ecstatic when she said she loved my manuscript and wanted my permission to forward it to an agent she knew. While I waited to hear back, I worked on the changes she suggested, and began pitching online to agents and publishers via RWA and the Australian Society of Authors, who offer literary speed dating. I’d completely forgotten that if you want an agent, it’s best to pitch only to agents, so that they can then approach publishers on your behalf with new material. It turned out not to matter for me in the end, as I persuaded Alex to become my agent, but it’s something to be aware of. 

The pitching and what felt like endless waiting coincided with lockdown, and I felt very much that I was in limbo, although I was heartened that several people had requested full or partial manuscripts, which I sent, along with carefully crafted query letters, a synopsis and a bio. There are reams of information on the internet about how to pitch and how to write these materials. One incredibly important thing to know is that the synopsis is just as important as the first three chapters in catching a publisher or agent’s attention, so it’s worth spending the time drafting something decent and seeking feedback from others.

  I hadn’t really written with the market in mind, but after Covid and lockdowns, commercial fiction publishers were on the lookout for what they call ‘uplit,’ and my manuscript fitted the bill, as I’d written it with the aim of cheering myself up while I worked as a social worker. I waited and waited, receiving a couple of kindly worded rejections in the meantime.

One day Alex called again to say that her agent had declined to take me on, but she knew a publisher who might be interested in my manuscript. It turned out that she also knew Rachael Donovan, publisher at Harlequin, who I’d already pitched to, but hadn’t yet heard back from. Alex agreed to represent me to Rachael, and to the other publisher.

There was more agonising waiting after Alex had made contact with Rachael, lots of babysitting of grandchildren, some work on my second novel. I read the online advice. Work on your next novel. Cultivate patience. I had trouble with this.

Alex said that the other publisher was too busy to take a look at my manuscript just now, but a little over four weeks later, Rachael told Alex that she was taking my manuscript to an acquisitions meeting at Harlequin. She asked for an assurance that I’d continue to write rural romance, which I was happy to give, as it’s a sub-genre with endless ‘scope for imagination,’ as Anne of Green Gables might have said.

I was beyond excited, but Alex warned me that as a debut author I had a fifty-fifty chance of getting through acquisitions. Rachael was to be my advocate, and she possibly had the editorial team on her side, but she had to convince the finance and marketing people that my novel was saleable.

It was another two weeks until the meeting. At this point I became worried that my ‘better late than never’ approach to social media and establishing an online presence was going to backfire. Alex was incredibly reassuring about this and I calmed right down. That very afternoon Alex heard on the grapevine that the meeting had gone well, but Rachael still had to put forward a business case with projected profit and loss before the company could formally accept the proposal and authorise Rachael to send out an offer memo. One week later the offer memo arrived in my inbox, along with a beautiful, warm email from Rachael and we were away. Negotiations followed, and then on December 2nd  2021, I received my final contract. At this stage my yet to be retitled novel is scheduled for publication in September 2023.

 I haven’t yet come down from the high that I’ve been on ever since Alex forwarded Rachael’s lovely email with the offer memo attached. I’m sure there’s much more finetuning ahead with my manuscript, but I’m deliriously happy that seasoned publishing industry professionals like Alex and Rachael have believed in my work. 

 If I count all the false starts, it took me years to finish my first novel. I’ll be 58 when it’s published but I don’t care because I just feel so lucky to be able to do exactly what I want to be doing at this late stage in my career. Besides, 58 is considered young these days. My second novel is proving to be just as challenging as my first, but I’m buoyed by Rachael and Alex’s expression of faith in the work I’ve already done. 

So best of luck, fellow writers. It can be a tortuous path to finishing a novel that you’re happy enough for others to read, but it’s so worth it in the end.