However, the purpose of this blog is not to scare the potential authors, but to share my experience and send a message that it is difficult but achievable to the persistent ones.

In the winter of 2004 I left Wellesley with all the credits I needed and the manuscript of this book I had just completed. At that time it was called Iron and Rice.

A few months later I had settled in my new job, and I remembered the manuscript. I didn’t know what to do with it. I could lock it in the drawer, or I could try to get it published. At that time, I was brave, newly out of college still riding the force of innocence, or ignorance if you say it in a different way. 

I knew nothing about publishing, so I went on Google. I learned that the first thing I need to do is getting an agent. A literary agent is just like a real estate agent, who has a collection of properties and then sells them on behalf of the owners. The best way to get an agent’s attention is through referral, because they literally get hundreds of inquiries every week.

I didn’t know anyone in the literary world, so the only choice I had was to contact the agents directly. So I searched the Internet again and compiled a list of agents. I wrote a nice one-page inquiry letter where I gave a description of my book and reasons why it is unique and sellable. And then along with the first two chapters of my writings, I sent the package out.

Every day when I got some free time from work, I sent out a package or two. It took me several months to send to every single agent in the country. Sometimes I thought myself stupid and crazy because most of these packages may just go directly to the garbage cans, but I told myself, if every agent in the country rejects me, then I’ll forget the manuscript forever, but at least I could tell myself that I tried.

A few weeks later I started to get responses in the mail, most of which are polite rejections. It didn’t feel good reading letters like that. I put them in a drawer. They piled up gradually, together with my anxiety and self-blaming. Why would anyone want to listen to your story, a country girl? I asked myself. But a couple of them expressed interest and asked me to send them the entire manuscript, which I did, but it fell to silence.

One Friday in April someone called Maya wrote to me an email that she’d like me to send her an electronic version of my book because she wanted to read it over the weekend. And on Monday she wrote to me that she thought my story was very interesting and she’d like to represent me.

So just like that I had gotten myself an agent, something I thought almost impossible just months ago. Later Maya told me that I was the first client she had ever taken on from the “slush pile”— the random packages in the mail coming without referrals.

But that was just the beginning. During the next year and half Maya and I rewrote the manuscript multiple times. By the end of 2006 when she thought it was finally ready to be pitched, the story was like a patient after many surgeries, with different organs inside but much better health.

2007 was a long year of waiting for me while Maya was doing her part selling the book. I completely understood the difficulty of selling a new author’s book, so I didn’t get impatient, but by the end of the year I had given up hope. I talked to Maya once every other month, sometimes longer, just for updates. She told me that the first round of pitching usually go to the big publishers. And we didn’t get a lot of interest, so she sent out the second round.

Sometimes I am amazed how slow the publishing world operates. It’s as if that world is in slow motion, or still exists in the 1950s when there was no telephone, no instant message, no email or Internet. It takes people in that world weeks to read a letter, months to respond to an inquiry and years to publish a book. No wonder it’s shrinking, one of the few industries Warren Buffet won’t touch I guess.

The winter of 2007 and spring of 2008 was one of the most difficult periods of my life when I was forced to end my nine-year marriage and move out the house I decorated with my own hands. Just when my whole world was in darkness and I was deeply trapped in my depression, Maya sent me a message that SoHo Press had agreed to publish my book. The news came like a dose of energy to my dying spirit. I couldn’t believe it; finally I will see my story in a book! I remember I ran down the hall on my office floor to my boss, and I smiled, one thing I hadn’t done for months.  

Then came another two rounds of revision led by SoHo’s very diligent editor Katie. By the time we finished, I honestly couldn’t remember exactly what was included and what was omitted because from my raw manuscript to the final version it had gone through a complete makeover.

It would take another year for the book to be published in July 2009. When the box of final hard-cover books arrived in my apartment, I held one at my hand with tears in my eyes. It not only proved that hard work will be paid off, it also showed that my story is not meaningless, it will be read by many people and it will stay in print forever. In some way, it is a verification of my life, that no matter what I went through it’s worth it. It is how life is supposed to be.