One thousand

A few days ago, Sea of Secrets reached its 1,000th sale. It’s been almost exact­ly six months since I pub­lished it, and it’s been an amaz­ing ride–and one that’s far from over. Sea of Secrets orig­i­nat­ed as a man­u­script I wrote when I was in grad school; at that time I called it Still Waters, as in “still waters run deep,” a ref­er­ence I lat­er real­ized was ambigu­ous. After mak­ing the usu­al rounds of edi­tors and agents in the late nineties, it went into a draw­er, until a moti­vat­ing talk at a Decem­ber 2011 meet­ing of the Geor­gia Romance Writ­ers gal­va­nized me to put it out in the world.

I mar­vel at how much the world has changed with the advent of e‑publishing and the abil­i­ty to cir­cum­vent the gate­keep­ers that turned my book away because–and this was quite a legit­i­mate rea­son for reject­ing it–it belonged to a genre that was no longer trendy. Tra­di­tion­al pub­lish­ing hous­es do have to keep an eye on the bot­tom line, like all busi­ness­es, and I had writ­ten what I loved, not what was then sell­ing. So I can say with­out exag­ger­a­tion that it’s been the con­sum­ma­tion of a long-held ambi­tion to pub­lish this book and see peo­ple buy­ing it and read­ing it. And even, which is more grat­i­fy­ing than I can express, enjoy­ing it.

My apolo­gies for being sen­ti­men­tal; land­marks some­times do that to me! But if you’ve been one of the many gen­er­ous and sup­port­ive peo­ple who’ve helped Sea of Secrets reach 1,000 sales, please know that I’m tru­ly thank­ful.

For the past year and a half I’ve been work­ing hard on new fic­tion, a young adult para­nor­mal romance tril­o­gy that I’m deter­mined to self-pub­lish before the year is out. It’s been such a dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence from writ­ing Sea of Secrets. That man­u­script I wrote in a vac­u­um, where­as my works in progress ben­e­fit from the scruti­ny and input of a won­der­ful team of beta read­ers and friends, who are help­ing me to make these sto­ries as good as I can pos­si­bly make them–or at least as good as they can get until I become too impa­tient to keep revis­ing fur­ther; my per­fec­tion­ism and my impa­tience are eter­nal­ly locked in a clash of titans. 🙂

I hope, and I believe, that when I do release my new works, they’ll have a head start in the world because of the won­der­ful read­ers and review­ers who have embraced Sea of Secrets. Thank you all for a glo­ri­ous six months, and here’s to many, many more to come!