They Said Yes!

Back on Jan 14, 2018, I submitted a book publishing proposal to She Writes Press. "Proposal" is the wrong term. A proposal is what a non-fiction writer sends to a publisher before the book is actually written. Fiction writers don't have such luxury. They have to have completed the book and then submit the first 20 pages double spaced. Plus, they asked for a summary and a bio. I instead had a "pitch" that I had been sending to agents, so I sent that instead. They told me expect to wait 4-6 weeks and I did my level best to stop worrying about it which I was partially successful, except for the week counting every so often. Well today I heard back and they said Yes! An unconditional yes which completely shocked me. 

They have three tiers.
  Level I - Looks great, let's do this
  Level 2 - It needs some copy editing
  Level 3 - Your story needs work

I had hired my friend Diane to copy edit the first 50 pages, but even with that, I was still expecting Level 2 or 3. No. They said it was ready to go. OMG. Really?

Trouble is that we have to copy-edit pages 50 to the end, so the real work is still in front on us, but I am on Cloud 9+. They wrote up a nice assessment (in a much better style than I could manage myself) that said how intrigued with the story they were and looked forward to hearing more.

The other big thing is that I need to start a business for my writing. Ulp. I have no idea how to do that, so I'm going to be nagging family members on how to do this. She Writes Press co-founder Brooke Warner's book Green Light Your Book discusses this, so I have to spend more quality time with it, and with an 80 page PDF that they send to the Tier 1 and 2 folks.

Once again, I feel like a kid in adult shoes.