January 6, 2021
Collision Post Three
Welcome to Day Three of Collision!
Week 1, Day 3 – Collision
Genre: New Adult Mystery/Romance
Release Date: April 28, 2014 AND June 10, 2014
Cover Design: Etopia Press AND Kate L. Mary
Formats: ebook, audiobook, and paperback
Amazon US
Amazon UK
Amazon Universal
Audible
Goodreads
UK Audiobook Listeners: Grab a code for a FREE audiobook of Collision
Some secrets are better left untold…
When eighteen-year-old Kara Jones gets into a car accident on the way home from college, she’s left with more than a few bruised ribs, a busted cell phone, and a totaled car. After a slip-up at the hospital, she’s shaken to discover that her family isn’t all it seems. And now her mother’s strange behavior and willingness to do anything to protect her secrets—including pulling Kara out of school—have Kara floundering in the dark.
Enter Derek Miller, a former classmate who’s dealing with family issues of his own. His nerdy charm is too much for Kara to resist, and she’s even more amazed when he agrees to help her dig into her mother’s past. Together they investigate her mother’s old friends and boyfriends, hoping to discover who Kara really is. Instead, they find disturbing connections to the dark history of Kent State University, and an ever expanding maze of mystery surrounding Kara’s birth.
As Kara and Derek chase secrets, she realizes he’s the only person she can trust. But as they get closer to the truth, the disturbing answers reveal a web of evil far darker and further reaching than they’d imagined, leaving Kara to wish she’d never asked the questions in the first place.
What was the writing and publishing process for Collision like?
I can remember how long it took me to write some of my books – roughly, of course – but it’s been so long ago for this one that I can’t remember exactly how long it took. I will say that even as a new writer, I could pump them out pretty fast. I started writing in mid-2012 and by the time this book was released in April of 2014, I had already written more than seven whole books! That’s a lot of books for a newbie. No, they weren’t all good – I already talked about that – but I’d done it, and that was a huge accomplishment considering this was something I’d always wanted to do.
So, I had the book done and I sent it off to some friends to read, as well as my very first critique partner, Lisa Terry, and got feedback which was (this is a quote because I still have the email): THIS IS A GREAT BOOK. This is THE book in my opinion. That feedback meant all the world to me. It was amazing.
Around this time, new adult fiction was HUGE. It was something people had been writing but no publishers wanted to touch it because they thought this college-age angsty romance had no market. It was too old for YA audiences and too young for adults, so there was really no room for it. Well, authors started self-publishing and BAM! It took off. At the time, it was mainly romance, but a lot of people were hoping to expand the category and create new adult science fiction, mystery, horror, and more, so that was where this book came in. I started submitting it to agents and small publishers hoping to get a deal, and although I never got far in the agent search with it, I did get an offer from a small press, and in January of 2014, I signed a contract with them.
Things didn’t go exactly as expected. Collision was published by this small press in April of 2014 – in ebook only – and at some point at the beginning of that year, I also signed a contract for Broken World with the same publisher. However, it didn’t take long for me to become unhappy with how things were going. June arrived and while I knew Broken World was supposed to come out in July, I still didn’t have a release date. It wasn’t available for pre-order and I had no way to drum up excitement because I didn’t even have a cover! The communication had been horrible as well as, and in my opinion, the publisher wasn’t following through with their end of our contract. So, on June 10, 2014, I drafted a very professional (I’m not joking about that. It was 100% professional.) email about my concerns and sent it to the publisher expressing my concerns. I received a reply that night and traded a few emails with one of the editors who expressed that she felt I was behaving professionally and told me she had forwarded my email to the executive editor. The following morning, however, I got a reply that blew me away. The executive editor told me that she felt it would be in both our best interests to discontinue our professional relationship and she was returning my rights to me. At first, I thought it was just for Broken World, but then I found out it was for Collision as well, which they had already pulled from all retailers. So, I went from having one book published and another on the way to nothing.
It was a huge blow, and while I hadn’t been happy with how things were going and part of me was relieved, I couldn’t help feeling a little lost. Right away I decided I was going to self-publish Collision (as fast as possible since it had been available on Amazon the day before) but I had no budget for a cover and no clue how to format a book. I’d already used the website Fiverr for one book cover (more on that next week), so I dropped $5 (plus a little extra for a rush job) on a new (and very generic) book cover just to get me through. I then spent THE WHOLE DAY researching how to format an ebook and how to self-publish on Amazon and who knows what else. It was exhausting, but by the end of the day I had my book back up on Amazon. I updated the cover in April of 2015 to something less generic – it wasn’t great since my design skills were pretty basic at the time – then again in February 2020 to the current one. Check out the evolution of this cover!
