Birth of a Novel (First Son)

We'll take one as an example, although all five of them (currently available) have taken similar paths.

I wrote First Son specifically for Loose-Id. This is a popular publisher of erotic ebooks. Instead of writing M/F Erotica, I decided to try M/M Erotica since I had already written several M/F Romances.

Examples of my previous romances include Drained, my latest which sat on an editor's desk and never got read, but dammit I like it, Travel Logged, a great idea for a novel and my biggest seller until my recent publishing blitzkrieg, and Remote Control, another clever idea that is probably a weak romance since it was rejected by Dorchester Publishing after waiting months for a friend/editor to read it.

Several months after submitting a query letter and sample for First Son to Loose-Id, I received an email indicating that the editor loved it and I should submit the entire manuscript.  I was off and running... until I received another email indicating that the manuscript was rejected by upper management.  Too silly and improbable they said.  After bragging to everyone that I was about to be published, I was heart broken at the receipt of the rejection email.  This was the closest I had come to being published.  First Son went onto the heap along with the rest of my rejected manuscripts.

At the beginning of August 2010, I was bored and thought I'd try publishing all the detritus littering my computer.  One by one I submitted my manuscripts to Amazon and Smashwords, along with several rejected manuscripts by my wife, published author Melanie Jackson.  Then I waited, kinda.

A post somewhere led me to Goodreads. There my wife and I promoted our books and First Son started to sell on Amazon.  Initial indications, as with Blood Reich, my horror novel that lost Dorechester's First Blood competition, was that the book contained a lot of typo's.  Of course it did, it had never really gone through the editing phase.  It was published at the whim of a bored and frustrated computer software developer.

I read First Son and found many typos.  I've since corrected them and committed new revisions of the book to Amazon and Smashwords.  As I read the book, I found that I liked it.  It may actually be my strongest work.  Silly and improbable, definitely.  But it's a decent book.  I plan on writing future M/M Romances (in fact I've already started one which should be a stunner).

I'm thankful to those who have supported First Son.  I'm grateful to those who have bought it.  The greatest thing that can ever happen for an author is to have someone read their work.  This has finally happened for me.  At least to one extent, I can now die content.  Now for the rest of my confusing life ;-).

Good night, all.