Inkspell Publishing picks up Wish Upon A Bollywood Star

Inskpell Publishing and I inked a contract last week. Yay!  🙂

Inkspell Publishing Contract!

Inkspell Contract!

You will remember that I submitted Wish Upon A Bollywood Star in January to the Scout competition.  And it wasn’t chosen. 🙁

So I edited it again and sent it out to Inkspell Publishing.

Those of you who are my regular readers know that I’m a book cover freak and they have some beautiful covers. 

One of their books, Glimpses of Wilderness by Lee Ann Ward has been nominated for a cover prize at allauthor.com. You can vote for her book here.I love their book covers.

So I had my fingers crossed they’d pick my book.  I’ve submitted other manuscripts to them before and the books hadn’t quite fit for them.  This time I was pretty sure the book would get picked up. Sue Grimshaw, editor at Random House’s Loveswept and Flirt had been kind enough to say the book would be picked up by other publishers if I’d make some changes, after she turned it down. That was in November last year. Five months later, after many changes, I pitched the book over to Inkspell and a few other imprints.

They were kind enough to write back and give me a timeline of how things work at their house. It would take a month or so for them to start reading and then deciding. They even wrote back to tell me when they did start reading.

After five weeks, I had a contract! Yikes!

I withdrew my manuscript from everywhere else and signed with Inkspell. I know a lot of people will ask why not wait for others to respond. I’ve been dealing with publishing for five years now and I always like rewarding the first people who are wowed by my work.

In my experience, I’d never turn down a publisher and use them as a carrot for someone else. A yes is a yes, plus the whole ‘wait and negotiate’ game is not for me. I don’t have an agent, so I need to sell my own books.

In the end I’m quite pleased with this signing. Melissa Keir and her authors are truly welcoming and work very fast. I loved the responses from her author group on Facebook and the calendar they set up for my book. Wish Upon A Bollywood Star has a publishing date of December 2018.