New publishing house for FINDING SHEBA & BENEATH!

So I've been sitting on this news for a bit as things were progressing.

On March 5, I received an email from Sr. Editor Anh Schluep at Thomas & Mercer. I do some indie publishing so I thought it might be an answer to one of my Amazon questions (which I'm regularly asking), but thought it odd that it came to my author email account. Anh wrote to me saying that she'd read FINDING SHEBA and she loved it, and would I be interested in republishing the book with them? She also said they wanted to re-release in 2014. So, of course I looked up Anh, and the imprint (owned by Amazon), and some of their authors. Thomas & Mercer publishes thrillers and suspense novels, and many of their authors are major New York Times bestsellers.

I showed the email to my husband and said, "This might be a game-changer."

The next day I scheduled a conference call with Anh (pronounced "On"), and we talked about the publishing contracts that Amazon offers. The only glitch was that I needed to get my rights back from the publisher who currently held them. So after reading through my original contract again, I contacted my publisher and he agreed to reverse the rights. In most cases, this is no small feat, and I'll be forever grateful for a publisher who saw that my overall career could benefit from this change.

Since Anh said they'd like to have first rights to anything in the Omar Zagouri thriller series, I decided that I wanted to use an agent to handle the business side of the contract deal. I emailed a couple of agents on a Friday afternoon (one who was listed in the top thriller agents) and the other I'd met at a writers conference previously and had been impressed with. Both agents came back interested, and Jane Dystel replied even though she was out of the office for the weekend. First thing on Monday morning she offered me representation and said she'd worked with Amazon on other occasions (which is one of the reasons I queried her). I signed with Jane, and in the following communications, Thomas & Mercer also requested BENEATH, which is a companion short story.

Tentative release date for the new editions of FINDING SHEBA and BENEATH is June 2014, and they will have new covers as well. UPDATE: release date for FINDING SHEBA is February 3, 2015, on pre-order here.

Here's the deal as reported in Publisher's Marketplace:

March 27, 2014 Fiction:General/Other
Indie bestseller Heather Moore's FINDING SHEBA, along with an accompanying short story, BENEATH, swirling around the seductive legend -- and perhaps reality -- of the tomb of the infamous queen, to Anh Schluep at Thomas & Mercer, by Jane Dystel at Dystel & Goderich Literary Management (World).

Reviewers needed: BENEATH, a short story

  Let me know if you'd like to be a reviewer for the short story, BENEATH, a companion story to the thriller FINDING SHEBA. Email me: heather @ hbmoore (dot) com

Coming September 2013

 Beneath, a short story

Companion story to Finding Sheba

E-book only $0.99 

Chalice Stratford hands won’t stop shaking, and not only is she required to give up her medical practice, but she’s forced to enter the witness protection program since the serial killer who brutally scarred her is still at large. Working in a museum in Bordeaux, France, the last thing she expects is to be abducted in a museum theft gone wrong. Omar Zagouri, the man behind the heist, is not who she expects, and Chalice soon learns he might be the one man who can put her demons to rest.