Writing is a lot of hard work, but sometimes luck plays a part in our success too. What are some lucky breaks you’ve caught as an author? Maybe it was in the writing, or inspiration, or on your path to publication. Perhaps it affected your sales after the fact. Tell us about one of your unexpected wins. Readers, please share your lucky breaks with us too.
Lisa Q. Mathews
This may not seem related to my writing career, but as a baby editor living in New York, I was…well, pretty broke. I really wasn’t sure whether I’d be able to afford my studio apartment much longer without changing jobs. But on a crowded subway one night, I ended up straphanging next to an acquaintance from an old freelance job. She was moving to Boston to be with her new boyfriend, but she needed to sublet her apartment because she wasn’t sure things would work out. $325/month, half my current rent. Her landlord wanted “a nice girl” to live in his carriage house. I somehow fit the bill–the only catch was, I had to care for my friend’s 2 nasty cats because they couldn’t move with her. The boyfriend was allergic. So I got to keep my publishing job, along with Satan 1 and Satan 2 (I’m not sure what their real names were) and started writing kids books for hire to bring in the big bucks (ha). I’m not sure what my alternative career would have been. To live in New York and/or work with books, you gotta have faith in Lady Luck–but she always comes through!
Ellen Byron
Luck put me in a room with Denise Hamilton, who used to write terrific LA Noir mysteries. We’d met a couple of decades before, when I made a terrible first impression. We wound up at her house because she and my husband shared a mutual friend. New Yorker that I was, I asked what she’d paid for the house. This was not considered impolite back home, where we regularly bitched about high rent and housing costs, but I learned that night it was not the way of L.A.
Anyhoo, cut to 2010 or so and our kids happened to be in the same art class. I apologized profusely for my faux pas from long ago and she was lovely. I’d written my first mystery, and she mentioned she was going to a convention called Thrillerfest. I knew my WIP didn’t fit that genre, so I asked her if there was a con for more traditional mysteries. She said, “Yes. Malice Domestic.” I went home, found the website, and saw Malice had a grant for unpublished writers. I applied and was one of the winners.
That’s how I wound up at my very first Malice Domestic in 2013, which kicked off my mystery career.
Marla Cooper
So many of the good things that have happened in my life can be traced back to meeting the right person at the right time. I had an advertising client who got a book deal with Chronicle Books, and she asked me to be her ghostwriter. After it was done, our editor reached out to me to ask if I’d be interested in writing a whole other nonfiction book — this one for a destination wedding planner. (I think you can see where I’m going with this.) Right around the same time, a friend of mine sold a cozy mystery series. So when I went in to meet with the wedding planner, it didn’t take long for me to put two and two together, and thus the Destination Wedding Mysteries were born!
Cynthia Kuhn
So many moments at writer conferences have felt lucky! I’m always very shy (yes, if you have met me, I know it doesn’t seem like it but it’s true…I am just overcompensating, which looks like super-outgoing…it’s confusing). Anyway, it takes some effort to push myself out into the hallway or bar group or restaurant gatherings but then I often meet someone who is exactly the right person I didn’t know I needed to meet at that moment. Maybe if you put yourself out there, it makes it possible for the luck to find you or something? Also carrying a four-leaf clover helps, I’m told. If you have one.
Leslie Karst
I always tell aspiring writers that first, you need to be a good writer and hone your submission until it’s as polished as it can be. Second, you need to be perseverant and not give up, even if you’ve sent out over a hundred queries (which is what happened to me). Because agents get queries every day, sometimes hundreds a week. But they generally only take a few new clients a year.
And that’s where luck came into play for me. My query happened to land on my future agent’s desk just a day or two after she’d gotten a request from my future publisher for books just like mine. Bingo! I got the full manuscript request and eventually the offer of representation. Timing and luck.
Jennifer Chow
My first lucky break happened when an editor read my self-published book and loved it. After sending her some sample chapters, I got a contract for my Sassy Cat series. Another break came during a SinC webinar, where I happened to talk about the importance of community; thankfully, the Chicks were listening and soon invited me to join the coop.
Patricia Sargeant
In 2015, I had an idea for a cozy mystery series featuring a Catholic Sister. I pitched it to my then-agent as Father Brown meets Murder, She Wrote. I loved this premise, which is the reason I started doing research for my amateur sleuth before I completed the proposal. Ha! Imagine my surprise when my then-agent said publishers wouldn’t be interested in the series. Crushing.
During this time, a colleague and I hosted a reader session at a book conference. The room was crowded, which is probably why I didn’t see my then-editor enter and take a seat toward the back midway through our presentation. At the end of our session, a reader wanted to know what my colleague and I were reading. I admitted I’d been reading a book on theology for a cozy mystery series featuring a Catholic Sister but that I wasn’t pursuing the idea because my agent didn’t think it would get picked up. After the session, my editor told me she was very interested in the idea and asked for the proposal. That proposal turned into my Sister Lou Mysteries. Those stories would never have happened if that attendee had not asked what I was reading while my editor was in the room.
Readers, do you have any lucky breaks you could share with us? We’d love to read them.
Chicks on the Case 