Author sells publishers on inspiring story

CALL IT BEGINNER'S LUCK, or perhaps divine intervention. It seems that every turn fledgling author Nikki Arana took led her to who she was looking for.

"Every time I need somebody, the exact person I need appears," Arana said.

Arana has been signed by Bethany House, a division of Baker Book House company of Bloomington, Minn., to a minimum three-book contract. Baker Books was founded in 1939 and began by publishing Christian classics. They continue today to work with authors who offer inspirational stories.

Arana's book fit into the publisher's niche. She describes her work as inspirational fiction.

Arana and her husband, Antonio, moved to Post Falls in 1993 from the San Francisco Bay area, which is the setting of Arana's story. It is based on their own unusual story. She chose to write the story as fiction because she wanted to add more characters and story lines.

"It's a love story I would say, rather than a romance," she said. Rather than the traditional love story of two people meeting and maybe one pursuing the other, she said, her story is one in which a couple's love was ordained by God: "He brings about the circumstances that causes these two people to meet and fall in love."

Growing up in an upper-middle class family, Arana raised Arabian horses as a young girl. Antonio was a stable boy when they met. A poor Mexican immigrant, he lived in a makeshift shelter under a tree for the first eight years of his life.

The Aranas will celebrate their 28th wedding anniversary in March. They have two grown sons, Esteban, 25, and Aristo, 21.

"That these two people could ever meet, much less fall in love, much less get married, much less stay married is a pretty unusual story," Arana said. "As the book has evolved, it has become very fictionalized. The true part anymore is the relationship between the hero and the heroine."

Her heroine is an attorney in New York rather than a real estate broker, Arana's career of 30 years. The character Antonio in the book is more true to who Antonio really is. Arana said her agent, Natasha Kern, liked the book because the hero is a man of integrity and honor.

"It does not have an alpha-male hero, which is what most all heroes in fiction are," Arana said. "Right now in fiction many heroes are these alpha male, macho, aggressive men, and the publishers are looking for a man that's an alpha male without being aggressive and macho."

She said that she was first drawn to Antonio because of his desire to give a day's work for a day's pay. In one of their first meetings, she asked him to clean a water trough. She realized she had no cleaning agents for him to use, yet he accomplished the task using nothing more than a rock with a flat side. The experience was humbling to her.

The working title of the book is "A Love Ordained," and it weighs in at 350 pages. She has just finished the first chapter of the second in the series which is titled "A Life Ordained." She is expected to produce 300-350 pages for that book as well.

"The couple in the first book have a child, who has Down syndrome," Arana said. "The premise of the second book is that this couple has a child, and the grandmother has the gift of healing, the power of prayer."

The path to the book deal began when Arana began to type out the story, and decided to go to a writers conference in Seattle where an acquisitions editor was present. She had three minutes to pitch her book. Her dad had bought her "Publishing For Dummies," and she followed the directions and presented her synopsis. The next day the acquisitions editor, who was from Tyndale House Publishers, asked her for the first four chapters. She had only written three. She went home and wrote the fourth chapter and sent it off.

Shortly after, Arana was asked for the full manuscript from Tyndale, so she got to work and had it finished by September 2002.

"That's when I decided to have a professional look at it, because I hadn't even thought about sentence structure since high school," Arana said. "Through some God-inspired circumstances I got connected to Karen Ball, who is a very well-known and well-established inspirational editor that had worked for Tyndale for 20 years."

Ball did the first edit on the book. Arana then had the thought that maybe she should get an agent before she sent it to Tyndale.

"What if they offered me a contract?" Arana said. "I don't know anything about the book business."

She queried four agents, learning how to do this by reading "how to" books. She was fortunate to attract the attention of Kern, a Portland agent. Kern read the book and told her it wasn't a book yet, and directed Arana to concept editors who could help her with building her characters and story structure.

"For sale-able, commercial fiction you have to have story structure and character development," Arana said.

Kern called Arana after reading the final revision and said "you did it." They had inquiries from seven publishers, but chose Baker because they are so well-established.

Although her book has sold to Baker, their editors still have a chance for a final edit. The book will not be released until the spring of 2006, because of the backlog of authors ahead of her yet to be released. It works out well because they want the follow-up released six months after, and the third installment in another six months. This gives Arana two years to finish the series.

"My whole desire when I write is to move people, to touch people," Arana said. "I like to make people think. Nothing would please me more than if somebody read my first book and never looked at a poor Mexican the same way. I hope that when people read my second book they will never think of a Down syndrome child the same way. God has a purpose for every life, and this child in the book will touch other people."

Copyright 2004 Cowles Publishing Company
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