IndieView: Magan Vernon

Magan Vernon is the author of the newly released book "How to date an Alien"

High school senior Alex Bianchi's estranged father gets her an internship at Circe Operations Center to pad her college applications. But Circe isn't your typical military base. It's an alien-run operation center and not all of the aliens are friendly, especially the one that tries to kill Alex on her first day. When Ace, a dark-eyed Caltian, enters and saves the day, she can't help but be drawn to him. Can these star-crossed lovers survive when they're on the brink of intergalactic war?

Today, Magan stops by to tell us about her journey down indie lane:

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The story gets told many times, how I went from a contemporary romance writer to an Indie published YA author. But what most people don’t know is how Shelli’s marketing helped me along on my  journey.

It was last January/February, I was just finishing up on my final edits of How to Date an Alien when Shelli ran a contest on her blog. She had people post a pitch and ‘Pay it Forward’ blog post to the people that had helped us out on our writing journey. I did both of these things and ended up getting an honorable mention on Shelli’s blog.

I didn’t get the attention from HER agent, but I did get the attention from another amazing agent who emailed me right away to say that she saw my entry and wanted to see my manuscript. I was floored. I thought ‘this is my big break!’ I sent off my query and first five pages and almost immediately she asked for a partial. Soon that partial turned into a full and I thought things couldn’t get better.

Unfortunately, that full turned into a rejection. She said she loved the story, but it just wasn’t right for her client list. I still admire this agent very much and she became my "kick in the pants" to know that my story was good and I shouldn’t give up.

So I sent out more queries. I was getting tons of requests from different agents and even interest from editors, but then the rejections started pouring in. I knew the story was good (I’d had many agents tell me that), but it just wasn’t right for what they were looking for right now or not what editors were looking for.

I wanted to give up, so I started on another science fiction story and brought in a few pages to my local RWA group. That is when I first met GP Ching. She read the first two chapters of the new story and kept saying, “You need to come to the Darkside Publishing.”

I was leary. I dreamed of the whole agent-publishing house- journey to publication. But when I got home that night I received another full rejection. I didn’t know what to think, so I talked to my husband. He looked me right in the eye and said, “You have been trying to get published for two years, what is the harm in trying a different route and submitting to Darkside? It isn’t going to hurt anything.”

So I did it. And now four months after submitting to Darkside I have my debut novel out for the world to enjoy. I don’t regret a single step of my journey and am grateful to everyone who helped me along the way.