"A Woman Knows By Intuition Or Instinct What Is Best For Herself"

 Remember a few months ago when I told you guys that I was waiting for a publisher to respond to me? Well they did!

Of course I was initially super excited, and I was so anxious to have everything move smoothly that I didn't want to chance it so I didn't even tell my mother.

Red flag numero uno should have been when they didn't get in contact with me until months after they said they would have been. Let's be honest though, I was on the high of being an author dealing one-on-one with a publisher. I didn't care about that crap. I was just happy that they read my book and decided to take a chance with me. They sent me over the proposal and it's a good thing I had done my research before hand, otherwise I would have been in for a huge disappointment. They offered a four digit advancement, but it wasn't too much to get excited over. Honestly, I make that amount before Uncle Sam takes his unearned portion out of one of my bi-weekly paychecks anyway. Blah, blah, blah, I skipped over some more crap and noticed that although I did 100% of the work I would only get 10% royalties. Oh well, that's pretty standard in the publishing world according to all of the other pages that I've read before. I read over the other crap about how they would own my stuff for almost a decade, and honestly that and a few of the changes they were asking for broke the deal for me. They didn't know Tamia Santiago like I did, so how dare they try to make changes to her personality?

After a few days of looking it over, I realized that I didn't want to trust anyone with my baby. I was the one who took almost 80,000 words, stuck them together, and created a novel (that is going to branch off into two more novels), so why do they get to have all of the say in the creative process of my book? I called the guy that I had been dealing with to tell him my final decision. Initially he was shocked because I was calling back to respectfully decline and I still had so much more time left to answer their proposal. After I politely yet firmly explained the reason behind my decision the guy that was supposed to be helping me seemed to get a little upset. He threw a few more numbers at me to see if that would change my mind, and surprisingly it didn't. You see, if he knew anything about writers he would know that those of us who do it do it because we seriously love it because honestly I've been writing a long time, and even with recent book sales I haven't even earned enough money from it to make a car payment with. So I once again respectfully declined his offer, and said I would keep them in mind after I had completed the trilogy for some of my future projects. His attitude and reaction was what seriously confirmed that I wasn't making a mistake. Even though I had sent my book off to dozens of publishers and had only heard a response back from one, his persistence after my firm decision confirmed everything that I had already felt about my book. I decided then and there that I was going to stop waiting around and just do this thing by my damn self (FINALLY).

Moral of the Story: Your mind and heart will play tricks on you from time to time (don't believe me just read a few of my personal relationship posts), but your gut always knows what is right for you. When you get that feeling that you just can't describe, you know the one where you can't pin point exactly where it's coming from - that is your intuition. Listen to it!