Rejecting Rejection with author Nicole Maggi

For today’s Rejecting Rejection post, we welcome Nicole Maggi. She shares with us her journey to publication and how a beloved book helped her at her lowest.

 

Surviving the Cancelled Contract

by Nicole Maggi

In the fall of 2010, I had everything: a three-book contract with a Big Five publisher and a brand new baby girl. I was on top of the world.

A year later, it crumbled down when my publisher cancelled my contract. Things had been cracking for a while; I’d been asked to do endless (unnecessary) edits and my acquiring editor had left. I never felt like my new editor was on board. So it wasn’t a huge surprise to get that awful call from my agent. But it was devasating.

In the weeks that followed the cancellation, while ugly emails fired back and forth between my agent and my former publisher, I curled into a shell and tried to hope. Tried to hope that we would resell my paranormal YA in a marketplace where paranormal had fallen out of favor. Tried to hope that I would write anything ever again.

As the months went on and the rejections piled up – all saying the same thing, “We love this book but we’re not buying paranormal right now” – I realized the only thing that would save me was a remedy I’d used once before.

Back in 2006, my first book had been rejected by pretty much every publishing house in NYC and my agent gently told me it was time to pull it out of submission and write something new. My heart was broken. But there was a cure: I was spending the summer doing Shakespeare in Connecticut, surrounded by an amazing group of artists, and at some point someone pulled out a copy of The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. We all decided to tackle it together as a group.

For anyone not familiar with The Artist’s Way, it is a 12-week recovery program for damaged creatives. Each week you are asked to delve deep inside yourself in order to heal and become a stronger artist. And so in early 2012, late one night, I went to my bookshelf and pulled my dog-eared copy off my shelf. I started to cry. Holding that book in my hands was like coming home, like finding a long-lost friend.

Each week I diligently read each chapter and did the exercises. Gradually I stopped asking “Why me?” and starting asking, “What’s next?”  And I started saying yes to things. I said yes to an online course taught by Laura Baker called “Fearless Writer.” That sounded about right, I thought. I needed to become fearless again.

I had the spark of an idea that I wanted to work up in the class. As I started to work on this new idea, I got really excited about it. So excited that I realized that I would write something again, and something good.

About a week later, I got the call from my agent that we’d resold my book to Medallion Press.

It is not a coincidence that I sold my book only after I got excited about my new idea. I had to put that positive energy out into the Universe to receive it back.

Medallion contracted me for just the first book in a planned trilogy. And there was another hitch–the release date was two-and-a-half years out. But I was so happy that the book would finally be in print that I accepted the contract. And then I realized what a great position I was in: I had a contracted book, but its publication was so far off that I had plenty of time to write another book before I had to worry about edits, copyedits and promotion. So I returned to my “Fearless Writer” class and worked up a detailed outline for that new idea. I sat down and wrote that book in a state of complete joy. Even though the subject matter is difficult and dark, every time I opened the document I was happy. Because I had succeeded in what I had really needed to do after my contract cancellation, what The Artist’s Way had helped me do. I had fallen back in love with writing.

I finished that book and sold it in a two-book deal to SourceBooks Fire last summer. Literally on the same day we made that deal, Medallion contracted me for the second and third books in my trilogy. In less than two years I went from having a three-book contract cancelled by a Big Five publisher to having two multi-book contracts at two sterling independent publishers. I pulled myself up from the depths of despair and am standing on the mountainside.

My daughter will be four when my book finally comes out this December. Bringing a book into the world is a lot like having a child. But without pain, nothing good is born. And when I hold that book in my hands for the first time, all the pain will be worth that sweetness.

 

Nicole Maggi  was born in the suburbs of upstate New York, and began writing poems about unicorns and rainbows at a very early age.  She detoured into acting, earned a BFA from Emerson College, and moved to NYC where she performed in lots of off-off-off-Broadway Shakespeare.  After a decade of schlepping groceries on the subway, she and her husband hightailed it to sunny Los Angeles, where they now reside, surrounded by fruit trees, with their young daughter and two oddball cats.  Her Twin Willow Trilogy launches this December from Medallion Press; the first book is Winter Falls.  Her standalone novel Heartlines will be released in February 2015 from SourceBooks Fire.