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Greeting on this cheery Tuesday morn, Novelspotters. Melissa Bradley here again and for those of you who don’t know, I’m taking the helm here for the week to talk a bit about my path to publication. When we left off yesterday I was telling you how I found Writer’s Digest and ordered every book I could get my hands on hoping to find out how to get my stories published. Needless to say it was turning into a money pit. And it was very lonely. No one of my acquaintance even knew writers were real people. To my friends and most of my family, writers were the dead guys in English class or the photo on the jacket of their library book.

I persevered in spite of this and during the course of reading some of my mortgaged retirement fund, I mean reference books, I discovered that the help I was looking for pretty much depended on what I wanted to write. Everything was broken down into markets and genres. So I sat my happy rear end down and focused on what it was I wanted to write exactly. It’s one thing to have all these stories written for one's own pleasure, it’s quite another to actually make other people want to read them. I decided to go with romance because it was what I knew best and had loved to read since picking up that first magic Harlequin at age ten.

Okay, so with romance in mind, I focused my writing, started working on a short story I knew would be a good book and thought I was all set. Soon it would be Big New York Publisher here I come. Wrong! Writing a full length novel was a lot harder than I imagined. I had written all these short stories and foolishly thought I could simply expand one into a novel. Yeah right. The two are entirely different beasts. And while I was faced with this daunting task, I also discovered that there was a lot more to this business than just getting my novel finished. I was ready to cry.

I found out one had to have an agent or at the very least a specific publisher in mind. And that was only the beginning. I hadn’t even gotten to the editorial process and the million and one other things that come after one’s material was accepted. I was right back in Cluelessville. This was not what I had envisioned. I thought I would write my story, send it off and voila! I would be published and then go on a book tour or whatever it was that glamorous published authors got to do. I was so naïve. I needed help serious someone-who-knows-the-industry help. And not one of my expensive books seemed to have the answer. I was sunk. Or was I?

The thing about having all this research material around is that while it may seem confusing at first, once you break it down and really take a whole new look at it, suddenly it makes perfect sense. I did some strip mining in my money pit and unearthed information regarding a wonderful thing called a writers group. There appeared to be a light at the end of this tunnel. Maybe.