Authors' Journeys

Jennifer Skully

Persistence as a Writer

Being a writer is hard work, and there can be a lot of disappointment along the way to that first sale (and the next and the next). I'm a late bloomer. I've been writing a long time (since I was in high school!), but I didn't make my first sale until 2003. Please don't make me tell you how many years that is, but it's a loooooong time (okay, it's on the wrong side of twenty).

When I joined RWA in 1995, I did know one thing I could do, and that was to actually finish a book (quite a few books, in fact). However, I needed mucho work on craft and knowledge on how to actually sell my work to a publisher. Up to that point, I'd been writing in a vacuum without any feedback. If you haven't joined RWA yet, that's the first thing I recommend you do, even if you don't write romance. While there's a lot of info that's romance-related, there's so much that RWA offers which is just about good writing no matter the genre.

So, I joined RWA and thought I was on my way. Eleven books later (including a complete mystery-romance series of five books), I still hadn't sold. I was getting great rejection letters complimenting my writing, but still no sale. Admittedly, I thought there was something wrong with me. I didn't think I'd ever make it. But despite those feelings, I didn't give up. I forged ahead and instead of writing romantic suspense, I tried my hand at erotic romance. Six months later, I sold my first book to an e-publisher, www.liquidsilverbooks.com, and Jasmine Haynes was born! What changed?! I think it was that I found a growing market, read a lot of those books to see exactly how they were written, and wrote what the market seemed to want.

And funnily enough, I actually enjoyed the writing. I then sold that five-book mystery series I'd written, also to Liquid Silver, and JB Skully was born! As Jasmine Haynes, I published three books and participated in three anthologies while at LSB. While that was happening, and after enough rejections to wallpaper my office, I got an agent for my romantic suspense, which has somehow morphed into romantic comedy with a mystery thrown in for good measure. Within six months, I'd sold that book, SEX AND THE SERIAL KILLER, in a two-book contract with HQN. And Jennifer Skully was born! Six months later, my agent sold some of my Jasmine Haynes material to Berkley, and I had an anthology out with Susan Johnson a year later! To date, three and a half years after my first sale, I have five books contracted with HQN, five books with Berkley, and my Max Starr mystery series with Liquid Silver. Last year I had four releases and the same for this year. In fact, today sees the release of my latest Berkley book, SOMEBODY'S LOVER.

It sounds like I'm tooting my horn, but what I really want to convey is that while publication was a long, hard road for me, I did make it. And because I'd written for so may years, I had a lot of material that with just a little tweak (or sometimes a big tweak) was salable. It was this fact that allowed me to put out so many books in a relatively short period of time. I cross my fingers that you're not as late a bloomer as I was, but if you're still waiting for that first sale, I hope my story will give you hope. Never give up. Learn all you can, write, write, write, and try something different if what you've been doing hasn't worked for you (e-publishing in a different genre, for example). My brother tells me that when he looked up the word "persistence" in the dictionary, there was a picture of me right beside it. It brought a tear to my eye that he was so proud of me. So, if you find yourself losing heart, don't give up. Keep striving. Soon, your picture will be in the dictionary, too.