Rex Kusler

In 1983 my imagination got the better of me and I started writing short stories. After success placing a few of them with regional magazines, I decided to write a comedic road novel. It was like a bunch of short stories strung together and no one was interested in it, so I wrote a suspense novel. That drew the interest of my first literary agent. While he was sending that around, I finished a private eye novel. I thought that was stronger than the suspense novel, so I sent that to him. He didn't seem interested in it, and after a few months he still hadn't read it--so I moved on to my second agent.

This agency specialized in private eye novels and the woman running it liked what I sent her so she started sending it around. In fact, she began sending all three of my novels out to anyone who would look at them. After about a year of this, I began to wonder if she had the necessary experience to represent my work--since she had taken over the agency after her husband's passing--and hadn't been working as an agent for very long.

So, I moved on to my third agent. He spent the next four years sending my private eye novel around (by then I had finished the sequel to it). And though it was a near miss at Berkley Books (PI novels were in a downtrend), he finally gave up on it--several years after I had given up writing.

For years I kept the floppy disks that contained the WordPerfect files for those first four novels. Eventually I no longer had the software to open the files, and I was sure I would never have any use for them, so I tossed the floppies in the trash. All I kept was the thick stack of correspondence from agents and editors as proof that I had actually written four unpublished novels that had amassed a large number of rave rejections from top editors.

For the next thirteen years I told myself I could always write another novel if I came up with something unusual. And in 2003 I finally did. I wrote "Angela", a coming-of-age ghost story. Nobody was interested--it didn't fit into a category. I considered writing a mystery for my sixth attempt; instead I gave up writing for the second time.

In the summer of 2009 I received an email from Amazon recommending a novel I might like, "How I Became a Famous Novelist" by Steve Hely. It's an entertaining book and for some reason just reading about all the inadequacies of the publishing industry made me want to take a stab at one more novel. This one was a mystery based on the sale of my travel trailer for cash. The first chapter in "Punctured" actually happened, except I didn't get murdered. As with all the others, I sent queries out to every legitimate agent I could find. There were no takers so I gave up again.

A few months later I learned about Amazon's self-publishing platform in the Kindle Store. I uploaded both "Angela" and "Punctured". Sales were miniscule at first, but gradually began to increase dramatically for "Punctured".

"Punctured" was re-released by AmazonEncore in 2011, and, after nearly thirty years of struggling off-and-on as an author, I found myself at the beginning of what turned out to be a very successful endeavor.