Don't Let the Door Hit You on the Way Out...

"It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power."

~Alan Cohen

So I made the decision to terminate my publishing contract with Virtual Tales.

There were a few reasons, really, one of which was that, despite the fact that they don’t have many stories up for sale on their site (they’re relatively new), it was taking them *forever* to draft me a cover or send me my first round of edits. And believe me, I know how slow the publishing process can take, but I’ve been lucky enough to have some experience now with Samhain, and it’s just a completely different story.

I also want to market my story in more ways than just an e-serial, and I wouldn’t have been able to do that with the electronic rights tied up at VT. Honestly, when I first queried them, I didn’t think the story would develop as much as it did. I thought I’d end up with 30K words, tops. Now I’m at 55K and I love it, I want more, I want to see it in print.

The nice thing is that the publisher let me out of my contract without any problem and waived the 90-days notice as well, so I have all my rights back ASAP.

The funny thing is that it took him less than 8 hours to remove everything from the website: my bio, my promo page, my name under the authors’ listings. And we're talking an overnight wonder: I emailed him at 10:00 pm (my time; I think he's on the West Coast), and when I checked at 7:30 the next morning, it all was gone. Maybe if they’d moved that fast with everything else, I’d still be working with them!

Oh, well. I know it’s the right decision. But now I’m back to the beginning with marketing Paradise, USA--which I thinking of renaming Lost in Paradise, by the way. What do you think?