The Book Inside You: Agents, Editors And Rejection

BOSTON (CBS) - Hester Young is still amazed at the turn her life has taken. She just wrapped up a national book tour for her first novel, "The Gates of Evangeline" which is on a number of 'must read' lists.

"I never thought the book was going to go anywhere," she told WBZ NewsRadio 1030.

Young would write as her son napped and that's when the book inside of her emerged.

"It's the story of a New York City journalist who is grieving the loss of her four-year-old son and in the wake of his death she begins to have very disturbing premonitions about endangered children," Young said.

She sent the manuscript out to several agents.

"The very first agent that I queried was interested, and then obviously selling a trilogy straight off on my very first novel was crazy," she recalled.

Read More: "The Book Inside You" Series

Another aspiring local author is Caroline Woods.

Woods moved to Boston from Delaware specifically to take Boston University professor Leslie Epstein's creative writing class. She calls her yet-to-be-published novel "Fraulein M" a labor of love.

"It's about sisters who are orphans in Germany in 1931," she said.

Woods has an agent, but not an editor just yet. She understands the waiting game better than most. While living in New York City, she worked in publishing as an agent.

"There is a lot of rejection. It's hard to face when you are a writer looking for an agent, but when you are an agent rejecting writers, and you see how many thousands you reject every week, well, it just got really hard. Every letter that came I saw kinda myself in that letter and I couldn't do it anymore," she told WBZ.

In part four of "The Book Inside You," a closer look at the business of getting books into reader's hands.

Listen to Part Three Of "The Book Inside You"