Discovered! The Lost Novels of Nellie Bly!

It was the first day of December, 2019, and like Alice, I was down a rabbit hole.

I was working on a short-story follow-up to What Girls Are Good For, my 2018 novel following the early career of groundbreaking undercover reporter Nellie Bly. My new story took place immediately after the exposé that made Bly a household name, her ten days spent as an inmate in the insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island.

That experience had been turned into a book, Ten Days In A Mad-House, a terrific and horrifying read that remains hugely influential to this day (the nurses she describes were evidently the basis for Nurse Ratched in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest). In order to catch up my readers on where the events of the story fell, I wanted to kick off with Bly receiving an offer from a publisher for that very book.

Trouble was, I had no idea how much money she was offered.

Fortunately, I knew the name of the original publisher, as well as the date of publication. But lacking a Publisher’s Weekly to report book deals in 1887, I started following the paper trail of the publisher himself. I thought I might find a contract with another author, or some perhaps some old balance sheets.

Instead I found something unexpected.