Rejected. Again.

After writing for most of my adult life, publishing fourteen books, and receiving wonderful reader reviews from all over the world -- especially America -- I have once again been rejected by a New Zealand publisher. 

For some reason I have never been accepted by mainstream publishers in New Zealand who, unlike my readers, don't seem to see any value in genuine New Zealand fiction. The constant refrain is basically: 'You're a good writer, your book is wonderfully written, but we don't see any market in New Zealand for quality literature like this'. 

This time it's my new novel Twice Upon a Time There Lived (see previous post below) about which Bateman Books said (by way of polite rejection): "While your writing is descriptive and evocative, we feel this novel is too niche and literary for our list. It’s also hard to sell a novel about an obsessive love between cousins to a New Zealand audience." 

How do they know that?    

Coming soon. 'Once Upon a Time There Lived'.

It's been well over a year -- interrupted, unfortunately, by illness --  but my new novel Twice Upon a Time There Lived is finished and ready to go. It's with a couple of New Zealand publishers but typically they are very slow to respond. For example, Penguin says to wait up to four months which I think is both ridiculous and disrespectful. However, I've decided that in this case I'll wait as this book deserves the support only a mainstream publisher can give. But if it's eventually rejected, as all my books have been, then I'll publish myself on Amazon/Kindle and sell it in America where I always get great reviews. 

Here's the cover blurb:  

When teenaged Barbara Conwyne learns that cousins who marry risk having children with mental or physical handicaps, she fears she and her beloved cousin William will never be able to marry. The cousins, born only weeks apart, to identical twin mothers, and fathers who were brothers, are biologically closer than most cousins and therefore, believes Barbara, at even greater risk.

Despite intensely and obsessively loving only each other, Barbara’s fears blight the first part of the cousins’ lives as they go their separate ways. Only after twenty unhappy years apart does fate work to bring them together at last to live in the family home in blissful happiness.

Until fate intervenes.