The Story I Never Thought I’d Tell with Rosie Makinney (Re-Air)

In this episode, you’ll also hear:

• The shocking turn Rosie’s first book deal took, and how it propelled her writing career in a very different direction
• Why you need a constructive and supportive writing community
• Rosie’s tips on choosing the right agent
• The importance of starting, even before you’re “ready”
• Rosie’s advice for the writer who wrestles with doubt and the fear of rejection

Finding the Right Story to Tell

Rosie Makinney’s book, Fight for Love, and her ministry of the same name aim to help people who have been affected by addiction to pornography — whether they struggle with this addiction themselves or know someone who does. 

Rosie is extremely passionate about helping people find their way to healing. But she also admits that, originally, she never intended or even wanted to write this particular book. 

Instead, Rosie got her start as an aspiring author by writing a children’s fiction book. When she finished the manuscript, it was as though doors started to open everywhere at once:

• Rosie’s friend introduced her to her own agent, who loved Rosie’s book and quickly agreed to sign.
• Rosie’s book was accepted by not one, but two major publishing houses who were competing to offer her a book deal.
• The agent started negotiating with the publishing houses to get the details of the contract nailed down.

But then, after all that movement, progress on the book deal slowed down. So Rosie decided to work on a different type of project while she waited to hear back from her agent. On a whim, she wrote five pages of the book that would later become Fight for Love for a competition at an upcoming Christian writing conference — and won an all-expenses-paid ticket to attend the conference. 

“I thought I’d just go and see if there was a market for it,” she recalls. “And the response to my idea was phenomenal. Everyone I sat next to said, ‘Thank you for writing this book!’ And I was sitting there thinking, ‘I’m not actually writing it!’” 

One of the people who expressed interest was someone Rosie describes as her dream Christian agent. Since this book would fall into a very different category from her children’s book — and since she still hadn’t heard much from her first agent — Rosie decided to accept the offer from this second agent instead. 

As it turned out, she could not have made a better decision. 

Facing Extreme Disappointment

While working on her new book, Rosie finally heard back from her first agent. No progress had been made; instead, the agency was shutting down. So she reached out to another client of that same agent, who gave her some truly shocking news: the agent had been making up fake book deals!

Sure enough, when Rosie contacted the editors who she believed had accepted her manuscript, she learned that none of them had ever received it in the first place. 

Rosie was devastated and confused. She had spent no money on this fake book deal, so the scam seemed to have no purpose, and some of the lying agent’s clients had even received fabricated rejections addressed from editors who never saw their manuscripts. 

Thankfully, Rosie’s second book was in trustworthy hands. Through the work of her new agent, she received glowing feedback from a number of editors. They loved her story and her writing. 

But now there was a new problem: Rosie had no author platform. Due to the sensitive nature of her book’s content, Rosie was writing under a pseudonym, and even though the editors loved her book and her writing, they were reluctant to sign her without a well-known name attached. 

“I'm having to put myself out for a project that I'm not even sure I really want to do,” Rosie says, “and everyone’s saying no. And I ju