{"id":827,"date":"2008-09-14T20:54:00","date_gmt":"2008-09-14T20:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/2008\/09\/my-first-sale-story-part-one.html"},"modified":"2008-09-14T20:54:00","modified_gmt":"2008-09-14T20:54:00","slug":"my-first-sale-story-part-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/2008\/09\/my-first-sale-story-part-one\/","title":{"rendered":"My First Sale Story – Part One"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"id=\"BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5245986518910062514\"<\/a>
I just want to remind everybody reading this post to keep all the victims of Hurricane Ike in your prayers. I was watching CNN yesterday since they were focusing on the storm.<\/p>\n

With my leaving for the ACFW Conference <\/a>in a few days, I thought I’d blog about how important it is to attend writers’ conferences, especially if you’re seeking publication.<\/p>\n

When I first started writing back in the mid-nineties, I joined an organization called Romance Writers of America<\/a>. They had a conference every year. Each year I would attend and meet with various editors, pitching my stories, hoping I could make a sale. When I initially started writing, the Christian fiction market was just starting to thrive. I found out more about the genre through the Faith Hope and Love Chapter <\/a>of Romance Writers of America<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Once I joined this chapter, I discovered more about the inspirational market. My initial novels were secular stories, since I was not aware of an inspirational market at first. I sent a few of my chapters away to a paid editorial service and when I got my edits back the editor made the following comment about my writing: is this supposed to be an inspirational? <\/p>\n

So I researched the genre, checked out some novels published by Multnomah from the library, and began to focus on the Christian market. I felt that this was the genre that I wanted to focus on since I loved reading the stories! I also joined the Heartsong Presents bookclub<\/a>. I submitted to Barbour several times for their Heartsong Presents line. I met editor and Heartsong author Tracie Peterson<\/a> at a Romance Writers of America conference. This contact proved to be crucial in establishing my first sale.<\/p>\n

I’ll continue talking about it in a later post!<\/p>\n

~Cecelia Dowdy~<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I just want to remind everybody reading this post to keep all the victims of Hurricane Ike in your prayers. I was watching CNN yesterday since they were focusing on the storm. With my leaving for the ACFW Conference in a few days, I thought I’d blog about how important it is to attend writers’ […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[72],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-827","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-my-journey-to-publication"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paovYP-dl","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=827"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/827\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}