KayeDacus.com

Here’s the story of getting “the call” and finding out that my first book, Stand-In Groom (then entitled Happy Endings Inc.), was going to be published. This was originally posted December 25, 2007.

What I Always Wanted for Christmas
I’m getting kind of spoiled these last two Christmases by getting my main gift a few weeks early. Last year, my parents sent me a brand-new computer and flat-panel monitor just after Thanksgiving. They knew I’d been having trouble with my old one, and they were getting new (Vista) computers, so Daddy just splurged and bought new ones for all of us (thank goodness mine came with XP, though!). Considering I spend 80–90% of the time I’m home on that computer, it was one of those “just what I always wanted” kind of gifts: unasked for and unexpected but greatly appreciated.

This year, I got my gift on December 6—something I’ve been wanting for even longer than I wanted a new computer, and something, again, totally unexpected.

I got a phone call.

Yep, that’s right. My Christmas gift, the one I’ve been wanting, dreaming of for years and years and years, came in a phone call at 1:00 in the afternoon, Thursday, December 6, 2007. It was a call from my agent, Chip MacGregor, to tell me that a publisher wants my contemporary inspirational romance novel, Happy Endings Inc. with an option of picking up the subsequent books in the series.

Having had a “false positive” with another publisher that said they wanted to buy a different manuscript (met with one of their senior editors, proposal went all the way to pub board and it took them three weeks to make the decision to pass on it), I was excited but still a little reticent about announcing it publicly. I did tell my closest friends, but asked them to keep it secret for the time being, as I wanted to be able to surprise my parents and grandmother with the news for Christmas. Because not only was this the gift I’ve always wanted, it’s the give I’ve always wanted to give to them.

Chip told me that there was a possibility we might get the contract before Christmas, but not to depend on it before mid-January. But on Wednesday, December 19, I received the contract. Thursday, December 20, 2007, on my lunch break from work, I went home and called Chip and went through each point of the terms.

Now that it’s signed, sealed, and (soon-to-be) delivered, and since I’ve given my parents and grandmother a mocked-up book cover with a coming soon message on it, I can freely announce here that Happy Endings Inc. will be published by Barbour Publishing in January 2009! (At least, that’s the tentative release date.)

In some ways, it still doesn’t feel real. And I guess it probably won’t until I’m actually holding the real book in my hands, or when I see it on the shelf at Barnes & Noble or Lifeway for the first time.

Merry Christmas!