UPDATE:  Building on this original post, I’ve just completed an interview with BookHive’s Queen Bee, Jennifer Bowen.  The interview sheds a little bit of light on how the book deal came about, which some of you expressed an interest in.

INTERVIEW is HERE

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I’m so very happy to finally share that I have a book deal for my novel THE EDUCATION OF DIXIE DUPREE with Kensington Publishing Corp.

In early April I received an email from my agent.  The subject line was pertaining to another novel of mine, so I didn’t open it right away.  I was expecting bad news.  When I finally did, this was the opening sentence:

“We have an offer on Dixie Dupree.”

I’d been going along for some time under a ceiling of doubt I couldn’t seem to shake.  Well.  The sentence blew that up.  And gave it a good shaking too, as if to say, “See, you didn’t think you could, and look.  You did.”

If you write, you understand this in only the way a writer would.

At any rate, already, so much has happened since that email.  I signed the contract in late May, and soon after…I received a stack of VERY REAL, RED PENCILED PAGES FROM MY EDITOR.   (I’m still screaming about all this in my head – here as well, it would seem)

And then, a few weeks later, the fully executed contract came from my agent, which truly made it “official.”

Since those first, very surreal and giddy days of happiness, I’ve submitted my first round of edits/revisions to John Scognamiglio, the inimitable editor I am so lucky to work with, and he has accepted the changes.

After that happened, the Publisher’s Marketplace announcement came out yesterday:

Debut
Donna Everhart’s THE EDUCATION OF DIXIE DUPREE, focusing on the shared secrets existing between an eleven-year-old and her mother, and who when confronted by cruelty from those closest to her, exhibits a prevailing spirit and resilience beyond her years, to John Scognamiglio at Kensington, by John Talbot at Talbot Fortune Agency (World).

Since April, I’ve been doing plenty of this:

A lot of this.

THE EDUCATION OF DIXIE DUPREE will come out as a trade paperback original, and the release date is NOVEMBER 2016.