After the call

So I thought I'd keep a record of when various things happen between getting the call and my first book actually hitting the shelves. With the caveat that every publisher is slightly different, so this is how it works with my editor (Jessica Wade), my agent (Miriam Kriss) and Ace/Roc (I'll just call them Ace for now until I know which arm I'll be in). Also, I'm in Australia, so I'm 15-17 hours ahead of New York depending on the time of year. So I'll give the dates that things happened for me but don't get confused if some of them are Saturday morning because that's Friday afternoon NY time.

For my actual "call" story go here. The actual call for me was Saturday February 20th after which there was a weekend of much celebrating and smiling and telling my news to lots of people and pinching myself to believe it was real.

23 February 2010 - My agent asked me if I had dates in mind to hand in book 2 and 3. At this point I had about 100 pages written of book 2. I will admit I wasn't expecting to be asked, I thought the publisher would probably "suggest" dates. It wasn't an easy thing to figure out without knowing what the revisions on Book 1 were going to be like. (At this point I found out the revision letter date was probably going to be around 1 April). So I consulted published friends and pondered and eventually came up with some dates. Given this is my first go around, I gave myself a fair bit of wriggle room, figuring that I'd never written a book while dealing with revisions and line edits and copy edits and all that other stuff. I also asked my agent to check if Ace were fine with M.J. Scott as my pseudonym.

26 February 2010 - Miriam confirmed M.J. Scott was okay with Ace and that she'd passed my details onto Jessica, so that I should hear from her soon (I will note that I had spoken to Jessica during the acquisition process). At this point I blogged the news, though I'd already told people on various loops and on Twitter). I also updated my website.

27 February 2010 - Got an email from Jessica to say hello etc. I replied and we organised a time to speak in person.

5 March 2010 - Spoke to Jessica (hopefully more coherently than during the acquisition process lol). She confirmed I could expect my revision notes around 1 April and went over what would happen throughout the process. We spoke about the title and biz stuff like international taxes (not an issue if you're in the US) and general answering of my newbie questions. We also spoke a little bit about covers and I got her okay to put a pre-official blurb blurb up on the website.

23 April 2010 - Miriam receives my contract.

29 April 2010 - I receive my revision letter.

30 April 2010 - I think a lot about the revisions and how I might address the points and send some ideas off to Jessica. (Luckily this was one of my no day job days!)

1 May 2010 - Jessica and I talk about the revisions and my ideas on how to proceed with them and come to some conclusions and then I start getting stuck in.

9 June 2010 - Started talking some more about the cover and found out my publication date is June 2011! Exciting!

22 July 2010 - Got my contract via email, asked my agent a couple of questions and ran around Melbourne finding a printer who'd print it for me on US Legal paper (which is a very odd size to we Aussies!)

23 July 2010 - Contract signed and mailed back to Penguin.

27 September 2010 - Miriam got the signed contracts back (and btw, finally got paid after um, three years and nine months of working for me)!

4 October 2010 - I got my copy of the signed contract from Miriam.

17 October 2010 - Handed in book 2

6 November 2010 - Another round of revisions of Shadow Kin.

11 November 2010 - Found out my publication date had been moved to September 2011

10 December 2010 - Got the first look at the cover copy and discussed with Jessica

17 December 2010 - Handed in my second lot of revisions for Shadow Kin

22 January 2011 - Another look at the cover copy with more discussions

8 February 2011 - Got my first look at my very first cover (yippeeee) though not allowed to share it at this point





And that's what's happened so far...I'll keep updating this post as stuff happens!