Guest Post: "The Long Life of My New Book" by Joan Schweighardt
The Last Wife of
Attila the Hun is a sixteen-year project that is about to
experience a third life in the publishing world. I wrote the first draft back
in the year 2000. I was fortunate to have a well-know agent to represent it
back then, but the consensus among publishers at the time was that a novel that
featured Attila among its characters was “too dark” for most readers. I put the
manuscript aside for a while. But when a friend called and told me she’d seen a
movie about Attila the Hun and that he was portrayed as a halfway decent guy, I
took my manuscript out and blew the dust off and started sending it around
myself.
The
next leg of the book’s long journey was in 2003 when I found Beagle Bay Books,
a small indie publishing company. The owner, Jacqueline Church Simmonds, loved
my book and published it with great care. She was a fabulous editor. She
published it in hardcover with a beautiful jacket and she offered it to many
reviewers and to magazines for various contests and even to foreign presses. I
could not have been more pleased with the results this small press garnered for
the book. It won Independent Publisher
and ForeWord magazine awards, received
lots of reviews, and was even translated into Italian and Russian.
Books
don’t have a very long shelf life as a rule. The book sold well for the first year
or so and then sales began to fizzle as new titles came in to replace older
ones. Still, I was happy with my publishing experience. My only regret was that
there was never any film interest in the book. We’ve had all kinds of movies
based on ancient history or legends or combinations thereof, with male hero
figures. Here finally was a story based on a highly intriguing but under-used
segment of history and some of the world’s best loved legends—a true embarrassment
of riches—with a very strong female hero figure to boot, and while I have
always known the chances of any independently published novel finding its way
to Hollywood are slim to non-existent, I had secretly believed that if the book
was out there long enough, someone would realize that it would make a great
film.
The
next leg of the journey began a few years ago, when Jacqueline at Beagle Bay
contacted to me to let me know that I could reclaim rights to the book because
Beagle Bay was transitioning from book publishing to book packaging, and they
would no longer be representing their previous titles. Knowing that it’s quite
difficult to find a publisher who will handle a reprint, and being busy with
other projects, I didn’t really imagine that I would want to expend the energy
to try to find a new publisher. But then I happened to read a blog post by
someone published by Booktrope, a publishing company I had never heard of
before. I looked them up and discovered that they were fairly new and had a unique
publishing model which had won them awards and investment dollars. Moreover, I
read that they had a relationship with IPG (Intellectual Property Group) which represents
books to the entertainment industry. And so I submitted by manuscript, and it
was accepted, and having been provided with a new cover, new identification
numbers, and fresh edits, it embarked on yet another leg of its journey, though
this one was short-lived.
In
spite of its trendy business model, Booktrope went under only a few months
after The Last Wife of Attila the Hun
was published. Their decision to close their doors hurriedly left some one
thousand authors orphaned. I felt worse for the authors who had only just been
published, or who were about to be, or the ones who had spent a fortune
advertising, than I did for myself, because here my book had had a previous
life. I had no plans to try to find a third home for it. But as it happened, a
third home found me.
Before
Booktrope went under I had been invited to do a podcast interview with C. P.
Lesley, an author who is also one of the founders of Five Directions Press, which
is a book co-op. She read my book as a prelude to our interview, and she liked
it a lot and we wound up chatting on the phone post interview about writing and
publishing generally. I knew from our
conversation that Five Directions is committed to creating a publishing model
that is just right for these times. (In fact, Five Directions is at the
forefront of co-op publishing and C.P. has been invited to sit on a Writers Digest panel with other well known
people in the industry to discuss the co-op model.) Basically, each of the
authors who is invited to join Five Directions must have a great book that all
the other members really like and they
must bring another publishing-related skill to the table. In this way each new
book receives professional editing, proofing, layout, cover design, and even
promotion from the other co-op members. And best of all, each author gets to
keep whatever profits are made from sales. When Booktrope folded, Five
Directions invited me to re-publish with them and of course I said yes.
So
now The Last Wife of Attila the Hun
Is experiencing a third life, and the third time is charmed, right? Does this
mean that someone from the film world will finally discover it and ask me to
write or co-write a screenplay? Probably not, but in the meantime I’ve developed
two treatments—a one-pager and one at 17 pages with the requisite number of
beats needed for easy transition into script—so whatever happens, I’m ready.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Title:
The Last Wife of Attila the Hun
Genre:
Literary/Historical Fiction with a Legendary Component
Author:
Joan Schweighardt
Website:
www.joanschwweighardt.com
Publisher:
Five Directions Press
Purchase on Amazon
Two
threads are woven together in The Last
Wife of Attila the Hun. In one, Gudrun, a Burgundian noblewoman, dares to
enter the City of Attila to give its ruler what she hopes is a cursed sword;
the second thread reveals the unimaginable events that have driven her to this
mission. Based in part on the true history of the times and in part on the same
Nordic legends that inspired Wagner’s Ring
Cycle and other great works of art, The
Last Wife of Attila the Hun offers readers a thrilling story of love,
betrayal, passion and revenge, all set against an ancient backdrop itself
gushing with intrigue.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joan
Schweighardt is the author of several novels. In addition to her own projects,
she writes, ghostwrites and edits for private and corporate clients.
Links:
twitter@joanschwei
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