I Have News!

Today is a special day, one I’ll remember always. After months of skin-thickening rejection letters, today I became a Booktrope author! Vox Dei Publishing, the Christian imprint at Booktrope, has accepted my manuscript and will be publishing Little Girl Mended! There simply are no words to describe what I’m feeling at this moment. After sharing the news with Joe, hugs and kisses all around, and then a ten-minute solo happy dance (sorry, no video), I walked around the house for a while whispering, “I can’t believe it,” to myself.

Truth be told, from the start I’ve always believed Little Girl Mended would one day be a book. I just didn’t know what path it would take to get there. I’ve always been open to any path, as long as it was God’s path. My prayer for this book has always been that God would provide all that I need to “go and say and do” whatever it is he has planned for my story, whatever that might look like. After these long months of waiting, rejection, and discouragement, my mind was wandering more and more to the prospect of self-publishing. When I began the submission process in April, I mentally gave myself till the end of August. If by then I hadn’t gotten anywhere but rejected, I’d switch gears and start working on publishing Little Girl Mended myself. So this week, as the end of August loomed, I hadn’t gotten any response from Vox Dei (my first choice of publisher, by the way). I submitted my manuscript to Vox Dei on May 11. A couple of weeks later, I received an email telling me their usual six-week response time was likely to be more like three months because they were swamped with submissions. August 11 came and went. Nothing.

Having been down the road of no response equals “no thank you” before, I decided to contact Vox Dei to ask if they respond, one way or the other, to all submissions. I filled out the contact form on their website with that very question. Much to my surprise, about ten minutes later I received an email from Heather Huffman, Managing Director at Vox Dei, apologizing for the delay. My manuscript had just recently reached her desk she said. Her next words were, “I was immediately drawn into your writing and profoundly impacted by your story. I wholeheartedly recommended you for acceptance.” I read those words over and over. After all the doubts over the past seven years of writing, to read those words and know someone found value in my story was overwhelming. I am profoundly grateful.

Heather apologized again for the long wait. Being a writer herself, she knows how excruciating the submissions process is. She told me to expect my official acceptance letter and package from Booktrope within a day or two. And so, here I am reviewing the contract that will make me a published author!

Praise God from whom all blessings flow!