#DFRAT Guest Author (+ a Giveaway): Eugenia O’Neal

I wrote Jessamine more than ten years ago after a lovely trip to the island of St. Lucia. The character of Arabella came to me in an old church there and I put together my story folder with postcards, synopsis, character sketches, etc. in the next few months. About a year later I had my first draft which I polished and polished in between any free time I had from my regular job. When I felt it was ready I began querying agents. A few asked to see a partial. And out of those about three asked to see the entire manuscript. Once called and offered representation and bubbled with excitement over the story and its prospects.

Her excitement was infectious and I truly began to believe that this might be my breakout novel. One of my novels had already been published by a small publisher and Greenwood Press had published my history of women of the BVI so I’d had some small success before. Reviewers had liked my work but I was still largely unknown. Maybe Jessamine would change that.

First, the agent sent it out to the commercial publishers – HarperCollins, Random House, etc. They turned it down. A good, solid story but too quiet, too literary, they said. Alright, she tried the literary publishers – Farrar, Strauss and Giroux among others – too much romance, too quiet. She sent it to everybody she could think of but finally admitted defeat after about a year. Jessamine sat quietly on a shelf while I turned to other pursuits, worked on other manuscripts. The agent and I parted ways. Dido’s Prize, another novel, was picked up by Parker Publishing but it seemed like Jessamine would never find a home. Friends who’d read it and loved it asked why didn’t I put it out myself but self-publishing still had a stigma and I wanted a “real” publisher to buy it and put their seal of approval on it.

Then I started reading J. A. Konrath’s blog and reading about other writers who’d gotten similar rejections to mine. I realized that one of the things that might have held publishers back was the question of marketing – Jessamine has both a white woman and a black woman as the main characters. It’s got a ghost but it’s not really a ghost story. It’s got Gothic elements but it’s not a Gothic novel. There is romance but it’s not a romance. I remembered my agent saying that it was a difficult novel to pin down. Where would bookstores shelve it?

And then I read about Amanda Hocking and Darcie Chan and that’s when I said, ‘alright, I’m in.’ I learned everything there was to know about self-publishing. I read and re-read Konrath’s blog, I downloaded the hugely informative free guides from Smashwords on marketing and publishing. I hired an editor to go through the manuscript and I hired a cover designer. Uploading to Kindle was very easy but Smashwords took me a few tries. Reviews have mostly been very favourable and it’s getting into the hands of readers so I’m really happy I did it. Now I feel free to write whatever I want without having to worry about which genre it will fit into.

My next enovel, The Water of Sunlight, will be out in October and I’ll soon be working on another novel. There’s still some stigma out there about self-publishing or indie publishing but this is a great time to be a writer and I’m hugely grateful to people like Mark Coker and Jeff Bezos for helping to make my dreams come true.

Grace Hylton arrives on the Caribbean island of St. Crescens full of doubts about her husband’s political aspirations, doubts about her marriage and doubts about the wisdom of relocating. Her native-born husband, Julian, has lived most of his adult life in the States but has come back to St. Crescens, determined to pull his country out of the cauldron of corruption, nepotism and crime into which the leading political dynasty has taken it.

An architect by training, Julian buys and restores Jessamine, an old Great House. What the Hyltons don’t know is that Jessamine is home to the ghost of Arabella Adams who lived there as a governess during the late 1800s.

Jessamine is told from the alternating viewpoints of the two women – both foreigners, both married to local men. An old injustice binds them across the century that separates them, but can Grace discover its roots before St. Crescens is plunged into violence and chaos?

Eugenia is giving a copy of Jessamine away to one lucky commenter! Good luck!!

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