Our first epubbed YA author is Tess Oliver, who has had great success this year with her two YA titles, Camille and Safe Landing. I've seen her books on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and saw her mentioned on Joe Konrath's blog as well. 
Thanks so much to Tess for participating in our little forum and sharing her story!How/when did you decide that epublishing would be your path?
I’d been spending most of my spare time writing middle grade and young adult fiction. I went to all the conferences, joined the SCBWI, and talked to the editors and agents at events. I received a lot of encouragement on my manuscript critiques and even some requests to see more, but I always got the same line “no place on our list for your book.” One big NY editor had one of my YA books for a year. Then I received a nice personal rejection from her. It made me laugh. I’d completely forgotten that she had it. I had two agents hold onto the entire manuscript of Camille for nine or ten months. One never responded again and the other finally responded with an email saying the market was already saturated with werewolf books. Have you ever wanted to yell at an email? A coworker and I did get a publishing deal with a big educational publisher for an elementary level science book. It’s written under my real name, but even that publishing credit didn’t get me through any doors. The querying process was like an emotional roller coaster and I needed to get off. Last summer break (I teach) I decided not to write anything new. I was starting to feel rather silly sitting on my computer writing all these stories that no one was going to ever see. And while I had no proof, I was pretty sure my husband was starting to roll his eyes every time I sat down to write. But not writing left a void in my life. I really missed it. That’s when my sister sent me the link to J.A. Konrath’s blog. I became a follower. (Is it just me or is he the hottest guy on the internet right now?) After that my incredibly clever sister sent me a link to Amanda Hocking’s books. She said,” This author is making it big with her YA books. You should give it a try.” So I figured it couldn’t hurt. My brilliant, beautiful daughter designed some covers and we uploaded the two stories I thought would sell the best.
