Twice Orphaned, Thrice Determined

by Catherine Dilts

What’s an author to do who gets orphaned, finds a new family, then is orphaned once again?

Hint: Quitting is not an option.

Back in 2012, I was enamored with traditional publishing. I hadn’t been able to acquire an agent. I was thrilled when my debut novel, Stone Cold Dead: A Rock Shop Mystery, was accepted by Five Star. They also published the second in that series, Stone Cold Case.

After sending in the third book, Stone Cold Blooded, there was a long silence. Crickets. The news finally came. Five Star dropped their mystery line. Not me personally. I was merely in the wrong place at the wrong time. They had been shedding genres like a bird molting in spring. Their romance line had previously gone away. Now their entire stable of mystery authors went poof overnight.

My mystery novels were now orphans.

Fast forward to a new opportunity. Encircle Publishing adopted many Five Star orphaned authors. We were delighted to have our series continue in a traditional publishing model.

Book three in my Rock Shop series had found a home. Then my new series, titled A Rose Creek Mystery, achieved publication of books one and two. I sent in book three, and was met with an uncomfortably familiar silence.

All good things seem to end. The creative and kind folks at Encircle faced a brutal financial reality. They made the decision to switch to a “hybrid” model. Meaning authors would pay for services (cover, editing, formatting) to have their books published. Not a vanity press. Not self-publishing. It’s perfectly fine, in my view, if you understand what’s at stake.

Having my second series orphaned after two books, I was ready to go it alone. Not entirely alone. My daughter Merida Bass declared she had no interest in trad publishing. She had witnessed my journey from the sidelines. We co-authored two books in a YA series that doesn’t fit the angsty, adult-ish tone of current YA. We knew it would be a hard sell to a trad publisher. And we started on a series whose pitch captured attention and interest.

A ninja kidnaps senior citizens and places them with families in need of a grandparent.

We both had a very good feeling about this project. In an informed and researched decision, we decided to skip seeking the traditional route and try self-publishing.

I couldn’t abandon my Rose Creek series. I requested my rights back from Encircle, which they swiftly and graciously returned. This orphan had self-emancipated.

Rose Creek book three, The Body in the Hayloft, released in December 2025. When my Encircle rights reverted to me for The Body in the Cornfield, book two vanished from the usual sales outlets. Book one is still available via Harlequin Worldwide Mystery, having been farmed out by Encircle in their final days as my publisher.

Yikes. Yes, it’s complicated.

I realized my series isn’t a series if books one and two aren’t available. I edited book two, The Body in the Cornfield. Why not? We have to redo everything, so I needed to do everything possible to improve the story before re-releasing. My daughter will create new cover art, and we’ll publish the novel this summer. This fall, book four, The Body in the Chuckwagon, will be released. When book one becomes mine again, we’ll do the same.

So much work. Editing. Cover art. Book design. Formatting. Getting the books up online. Hand-selling to libraries and bookstores.

Is it worth it?

Have you ever watched a televised series that is cancelled midstream? Like the cult classic Firefly, or the high-stakes thriller The Old Man. The dissatisfaction level at incomplete series? High!

I don’t want to leave readers feeling like the characters in my novels simply . . . stopped. Fell off the edge of a suddenly flat earth.

More important to me, I don’t want to feel like I left something undone.

At this point in my life, the best route to completion is this experiment in self-publishing. I don’t have to be an orphan anymore.

 

 

Writers Gotta' Write

Hello and welcome to my first blog. I’m extremely excited and honored to be joining the Type M for Murder family.  If you have any thoughts or suggestions about what you’d like me to write, please let me know!

Since the beginning is the best place to start, let’s do that. I’m going to make an admission, it took me 20 years to get published. When Cindy, my wife, and I were dating, and I was a single dad, she said, “Okay, your life is a do-over. What is it you want to be more than anything else?”

My reply was immediate. “I want to be a novelist.”

She quickly wrote it down on a cocktail napkin (we were at a holiday reception) and handed it to me. “Never lose this. This is who you are.”

Well, I lost it. Who keeps old cocktail napkins?

But I kept the dream.

Because I was still at the newspaper in Norwalk, Connecticut and raising my daughter, I could only write part-time. But write I did. My first attempt at a novel was entitled Crossbones. It was a historical novel about pirates and the destruction of Port Royal in Jamaica by an earthquake and tidal wave. I quickly discovered that historical novels are not my genre. It was awful.


By the way, NBC aired a television series by the same name in 2014. Not their genre either.

My second attempt at a novel was a mystery/thriller set in Connecticut called Pieces of Jake. I managed to land an agent from New York and I thought I was ready for the bestseller list. However, I discovered that this agent had little patience if one of the major publishing houses in Manhattan didn’t buy the manuscript. When we didn’t get a contract, he dropped me like a bad habit.

I had a chance to review the rejection comments from the editors and they primarily talked about the lack of character development. That’s when I started work on Providence and Random Road. Initially, the book was in two first-person voices. Two protagonists, one a male, the other a female. Then I discovered that the most interesting of the two was the female and opted to write the entire novel in the voice of Geneva Chase. I still couldn’t manage to get an agent interested. But I thought the character development was miles ahead of anything else I’d written.

Moving on, I tried my hand at horror. Also, not my genre.

Then a straight-out thriller. So bad my own wife wouldn’t read it.

Back to Providence and Random Road. I had a good feeling about it, I liked the main character, Geneva Chase, and felt the story had good bones. I shortened the title to Random Road and rewrote the hell out of it. Then, rather than take the shotgun approach, I painstakingly researched agents. I started by Googling and using the criteria: literary agents, debut authors, mysteries.

About thirty agents popped up. I learned about each one, who they represented, what they were looking for, and tailor-made the query letter to each. I made certain that if they were looking for 50 sample pages, I sent 50 sample pages. If they were looking for a synopsis (which I hate doing), I sent a synopsis.

I got four requests for the entire manuscript! To make a long story short, I signed with the incredible agent, Kimberley Cameron, and I’m working on my third Geneva Chase mystery for Poisoned Pen Press. In September, I’ll be on a panel at a Mystery Conference in Scottsdale honoring Ian Rankin and then at Bouchercon, I'm on a panel entitled “In the Papers—Journalists in Fiction.”

Recently, I gave a talk to about 50 people and I told the story about how it took 20 years to finally get published.  Someone in the audience asked, “Wasn’t it hard to write all those books over all those years and not get published? Didn’t you ever feel like giving up?”

My answer was, “A writer’s gotta’ write.” And my wife, Cindy, wouldn’t let me give up.

I might not have physical possession of that cocktail napkin, but I have what was written on it tattooed on my memory. I want to be a novelist.