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I am SO EXCITED for this submission success story, novel edition! Ashley was the first writer friend I made when I moved to Nashville in 2016. Both of us were just trying to find a critique group and going through the hell/fun! of attending meet-ups for writers in coffeeshops. We met a lot of weirdos, but we also met each other. Even back then, Ashley was plugging away at this book, this tender story of a long-married husband and wife trying to figure out how to deal with grief and each other at the same time. Over the years, I watched Ashley shore up the story, get it submission-ready, wade through the query and submission trenches, and then finally find a well-deserved home at April Gloaming right here in Nashville. The book just published this Tuesday! You can order it here, or if you’re local, get a copy and meet Ashley in person at her book launch party next Saturday at Random Sample in Nashville! (Details down below.) For now, I am so pleased to turn over this month’s submission success story to Ashley herself. Take it away! The first nugget of We Never Took a Bad Picture was a short story centered around the wedding day of a person not seemingly that thrilled with her marriage, and her grandmother taking a closer look at her own long-lasting marriage. That story became a line: “Silver was the wrong color.” This line tumbled in my head for months until it became a page and then a draft and then somewhere between six and nine drafts. Then my beloved 17-year-old cat passed away, and the story took a whole different turn. I wove in research on mental illness and senior men with a deep dive into the vintage veneer I loved at the surface. Most of the revisions and better drafts were done during Covid. Quarantine did provide more access to my writing desk and to the daily writing routine I had struggled to manage with non-quarantine schedules. Once I began looking at writing as a career, I found all these cornerstones of the writerly path: specifically MFA and agent. The first hasn’t worked out yet, but agent felt like the most crucial piece. An agent could open doors that I was unable to, knew the business language, could navigate the publishing landscape that I didn’t (still kind of don’t) fully understand. When I was querying this novel, I tried to follow the rules about submitting to X amount of agents. However, I did submit to April Gloaming before I reached that number. Nashville’s literary scene is something I value, and there was this voice telling me to go punk rock, to go more grassroots—and so I submitted. Given that I don’t know the Big 5 alternative, I can’t accurately compare, but I can say that working with an indie means have real human conversations and bouncing ideas off each other, and feeling like there’s an authentic investment in my work—plus, I was recruited to make some fun promo videos with The April Gloaming team!
The Stats: How long the book took from initial conception to pub date? From the short story idea in 2014 to 2025, 11 years. For the actual draft in 2018 to now is about 7 years. How many drafts? Around 6-9. There were many versions of “drafts.” I even have files labeled things like Draft4or5.
How long were you on submission from first query to AG acceptance? A little under a year.
How many agents did you query? Around 70.
How many rejections did the book receive from both agents and any other small publishers? AG was only one of two small publishers I had submitted to—so one rejection. As far as agents, most gave no response. I had four or five full requests and one partial. There were probably around 20 form rejections.
How long from the date you submitted to AG to acceptance? Almost five months.
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