A little backstory: I wrote the first draft of Blood Road in about eight months, from August 2013 to March 2014. I graduated college in December 2013 and moved to Sendai, Japan in the spring, and I put the draft aside for a couple months while I settled into my new routine. I picked it up again in June and spent nearly another year revising and editing; my first query letter went out in March 2015.
I spent another eight months querying. Here are the numbers, for anyone interested:
Total queries sent: 95
Positive responses: 15
Rejections: 41
No response: 39
Of those positive responses, seven were full manuscript requests, seven were partial manuscript requests (two of which were later upgraded to fulls), and one was my eventual offer of representation. I signed with Lane Heymont of The Seymour Agency on November 5, 2015, and we accepted the publication offer from Month9Books in January.
Honestly, I’m still reeling a little from how quickly it happened when it did happen: Lane requested the manuscript on Thursday afternoon and offered that evening, we went out on sub the next day, and not quite three months later we’ve got a book deal (two months, really, considering the publishing world is pretty much dead in December). I’m so excited and thankful to be able to share Blood Road with the world.
(If you want to know just how excited—I spent way too much time last night putting together specialized tea blends inspired by my main characters. You can view and purchase them all here.)