So\u2026 It happened to me again.\u00a0 Not a new story for anyone who\u2019s been in the publishing business for a while. Not even a new story for me. But it bites every time, anyway.<\/p>\n
My Market Center Mysteries series has been orphaned.<\/p>\n
Five years ago Five Star\/Cengage published the first book in the series, A Gift for Murder<\/strong><\/a> in hardcover and large print trade paperback.\u00a0 Harlequin Worldwide Mysteries reprinted it in mass market paperback 18 months later.<\/p>\n It took me a while to finish the second book in the series, Wired for Murder<\/strong><\/em>, but I did finally finish the first draft in 2014, had it read by a couple of beta readers, revised it based on their suggestions, and submitted it.\u00a0 In March, 2015, it got approval from the editor, who sent it to the contracts department.<\/p>\n I waited. And waited. And waited some more. Inquiries met with silence. Fortunately I\u2019m on an author\u2019s list for Five Star authors, where I learned that a few other authors were in the same position. And some authors with contracts were having their releases pushed back multiple times.<\/p>\n I began to get a bad feeling in my gut.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been published for twenty-five years and I\u2019ve seen publishers come and go. I\u2019ve been orphaned before. Not just once, not just twice.\u00a0 I\u2019ve seen this pattern and it rarely ends well.<\/p>\n In January, the expected word came down. Five Star had decided to close its mystery line. They would publish books already under contract but that was it. No new contracts.\u00a0 All the books they were holding were released back to the authors.<\/p>\n So I had an orphaned mystery series. I queried a few other publishers about it, with the expected result. They don’t want the second book in a series that started with someone else.<\/p>\n After a lot of rumination and discussion with other authors, I’ve decided to self-publish the remaining books.\u00a0As of right now, Wired for Murder<\/strong><\/em> is with an editor and the third book, tentatively titled A Perfect Home for Murder,<\/strong><\/em> is in progress.\u00a0A fourth, untitled as yet, is the preliminary thought stage.\u00a0I haven’t decided whether to wrap it up there or make the series five books.<\/p>\n Self-publishing involves a lot of work and expense, so I’m going to be interested to see how this goes.\u00a0But I really love the characters and the setting and I want to write these books very badly.\u00a0 So onward and forward.\u00a0 I hope to keep you updated on my progress.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So\u2026 It happened to me again.\u00a0 Not a new story for anyone who\u2019s been in the publishing business for a while. Not even a new story for me. But it bites every time, anyway. My Market Center Mysteries series has …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,18],"tags":[61],"class_list":["post-1296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-mysteries","tag-market-center-mysteries"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmccullough.com\/kblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmccullough.com\/kblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmccullough.com\/kblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmccullough.com\/kblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmccullough.com\/kblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1296"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kmccullough.com\/kblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1296\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1297,"href":"https:\/\/kmccullough.com\/kblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1296\/revisions\/1297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmccullough.com\/kblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmccullough.com\/kblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmccullough.com\/kblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}