The Call
In publishing, when it rains it pours—except when it goes up in flames
Juggling a writing career and a day job is never easy, and never was that more evident than when I received The Call.
If you’re never heard an author talk about The Call before, it is the moment when an author finds out that they’re going to be published. Usually the news is delivered via telephone, hence the name.
My version of The Call story happened in August 2015. I was a month into a new job working as an editor on the breaking news desk of now sadly shuttered digital news publication in New York City. My job was to cover the afternoon shift, sending out reporters to cover breaking news as it happened and editing articles our rewrite reporter would begin working on.
This is where I should probably pause to explain a few things:
Although I had signed with my agent, Emily, in October 2012, we hadn’t had any success selling a book yet. I’d been casting about for a few years, attempting to figure out what might be a selling proposal, but I hadn’t quite hit the mark.
However, that year I’d struck upon the idea to write a historical romance series centered around three friends who were all living and working in Victorian London. I wrote the first novella and had synopses ready for the next in what I was calling the Governess series.
I tried to keep a pretty clear divide between my day job and my writing life, which meant that generally I did not do any writing-related work during my newsroom shift.
At this newsroom, we often communicated via Gchat, so I always had my email up.
Around 4:30 that afternoon, a fire broke out on 13th Street near Union Square in Manhattan. I sent a stringer downtown to check it out, and my rewrite reporter began to make calls to the FDNY’s press office to confirm any details he could.
Weirdly the most perfect stock photo for a story ever.
Then, at 4:43 p.m., an email popped into my personal inbox from Emily that made my heart just about stop.
Yes, I still have the email. No, I am never deleting it. Obviously.
When your agent lets you know that there’s good news, you make time for the call no matter what—even when things are literally on fire.
I quickly made sure that my rewrite reporter had things in hand and asked my fellow evening editor to cover for me for a few minutes. Then I emailed Emily back and, armed with my phone, retreated to a conference room.
I should say, I thought I was being sneaky and very, very cool, but I suspect that anyone would have taken one look at me and thought, “That is a woman who is not holding herself together really well.” You see, Emily and I had been through so many rejections. We’d seen so many editors who essentially said, “We love Julia’s voice but we’re just not seeing debut historical romance authors doing very well these days.” It felt like landing a publishing contract was just out of reach.
And so, standing in the middle of the conference room where my team would hold our afternoon editorial meetings, I took a call from my agent who told me that we finally had a book deal. It was a three-book detail with an ebook-first (really ebook-only) imprint.1 Even at the time, I knew that the advance was modest, but it felt like the first step.
Finally.
Emily promised to send me the details of the deal, and I quickly called my parents in London before it got too late. I gave a very garbled account of what had just happened, and then I hung up, took a deep breath, and got myself back to work and that fire that was burning on 13th Street.
It’s safe to say that now I don’t remember much of what happened the rest of that day except that the fire turned out to be relatively minor, and I was back at my desk to edit the story.
For all of the excitement of getting The Call, it fit into the normal workings of my daily life because that’s what it had to do. My first book didn’t go to auction and land me a six-figure deal. I didn’t get a call from Oprah or Reese saying that they wanted to feature my debut in their book clubs. Instead, for many years, my day job paid the bills and allowed me to build my writing career quietly in the background. My first book deal led to another three-book deal with the same imprint and a contemporary romance. And then I pivoted into historical fiction and everything changed again, but I’ve already told that story…
Postscript
H/T to Kathleen Schmidt and Publishing Confidential, which inspired this format.
What I’ve been watching: The Gentleman suggested that we watch Twenty Feet from Stardom, a documentary about backup singers that I watched many years ago and recommended to him a few times over. It stands up to repeat viewing!
What I’ve been listening to: I’ve been catching up on back episodes of the podcast Normal Gossip
What I’ve been cooking: I made these scones this weekend when we had people over to watch the rugby. This is, hands down, the best scone recipe I’ve ever come across—and you know that if it stands up to scrutiny in the UK it’s got to be good
Long may those many ebook-only lines that sprung up in the 2010s as a response to the explosion in ebooks rest in peace…