Once I signed with Amy Brewer and Patty Carothers at Metamorphosis Literary Agency, we decided on which of my books we’d like to query first. We decided on Movie Star Memories which is a romance about love, loss, and addiction.

The first step was making sure the story was ready to query with publishers. This required me to go back to feedback I’d gotten from Wattpad and make any adjustments to the story that made sense to me. Then, Patty and Amy read through it and made suggestions on the character arcs and the ordering of the chapters (it’s a past/present narrative) to help with flow and understanding as the story progresses. We agreed on most of the changes and then I set to work.

About a month later, I turned the story into them and then they started work on the package to query publishers. They asked me for a list of ideal publishers, so I did a little research into books that I thought were somewhat comparable and who had published those. Once we had that together, Amy and Patty sent out the first batch of queries to publishers. I think it was around eight publishers in total.

Publishing is a slow process from wondering whether publishers are going to ask for the full of your manuscript, to wondering if they’re going to pick it up, to deciding what kind of deal is being offered.

We had pretty good feedback from a few of the publishers, but no one felt it was a good fit for their brand. We did get one offer from a smaller, digital publisher but in the end, it didn’t feel like a good fit to me and we moved on.

Eventually, given the positive feedback we had from the publishers we queried (and given that most of them were major publishers), I asked to table Movie Star Memories and to try another round with a different story that might appeal to editors a little more. At that point, I tidied up a novel I had called Retribution, and we repeated the process we’d done above for Movie Star.

At this point, we’re still waiting to find out what will happen with Retribution, and there is still one publisher with Movie Star Memories even as I type this.

If there is one thing I can say for sure, it’s that publishing is a long, slow process with moments where you feel like a pretty decent writer and other moments where you wonder if you’re any good at all. From what I can gather on Twitter and other social media where writers post their thoughts on writing and publishing, I’m not alone in these feelings.

Fingers crossed that a publisher snaps up one of my novels in the next few months.