At age 12, Sadé Odubiyi did not succeed in getting one of her manuscripts published. So she tried again. And again. And again.
Nearly 200 tries and 13 years later, Odubiyi had her first manuscript accepted in late 2002. Now, at age 30 and under the pen name Dara Girard, Odubiyi is an award-winning author of seven romance novels with three more on the way from Harlequin Enterprises, one of the largest publishing houses in the world.
‘‘The wonderful thing about publishing is you only need one ‘yes,’” she said. ‘‘Despite all of the rejection, you just need one person to say, ‘I’m willing to work with you.’”
It is a phrase Odubiyi hopes to be saying a lot with Ilori Press, a two-year-old publishing house based in Silver Spring she started with her mother, Marion Odubiyi.
Sadé Odubiyi’s love of books goes back before she could even read, when Marion Odubiyi would take her 2-year-old daughter to the library. Sadé Odubiyi began writing at age 7 while at Cannon Road Elementary School and took freelance writing jobs after attending Springbrook and Sherwood high schools.
Sadé Odubiyi’s first novel, ‘‘Table for Two,” was published in late 2003. Make that Girard’s first novel; before the book was released, her publisher, thinking ‘‘Sadé Odubiyi” was too difficult to pronounce, asked Odubiyi to come up with a pseudonym.
‘‘I’ve gotten used to it now,” she said of being called ‘‘Dara” by fans.
The storylines in all of Girard’s novels, however, are pure Sadé Odubiyi. She finds plots in newspapers and bits of conversations she overhears, on television and by asking ‘‘what if” about the world around her.
‘‘To me, ideas are like dust — they’re everywhere,” she said. ‘‘I’m like the fussy aunt that comes to your house and sees dust everywhere.”
The daughter of a Nigerian father and English mother via Jamaica, Odubiyi also uses cultural items she learned from her grandparents’ stories. Readers recognize these ‘‘immigrant elements” either as touches of their homeland or a different way of life, she said.
While Sadé Odubiyi’s books are of the romance genre, she describes them as ‘‘realistic depictions of relationships,” meaning Fabio will never grace one of her book covers.
But all of her books do have a happy ending.
‘‘They want to know that in the end, things will work out no matter how much tragedy might happen in the middle, that they can leave the book feeling good,” she said.
Odubiyi is a self-described ‘‘haphazard writer,” writing four hours a day on various parts of a story before piecing them together. She starts in longhand, and her work inevitably ends up in her mother’s hands for editing.
‘‘She can be brutal,” Sadé Odubiyi said with a laugh. ‘‘It’s good for me. She doesn’t care that she’s related to me.”
‘‘I’m hard,” Marion Odubiyi said. ‘‘When I’m reading, if I find anything that is just not within the flow, I’ll say, ‘Do not do that.’”
Marion Odubiyi is a medical illustrator by trade and often creates artwork for her daughter’s book covers, including the colored-pencil sketch of a necklace-wearing woman for ‘‘The Sapphire Pendant.” Released by Ilori Press last summer, the book recently won the silver award in the romance category of the ‘‘Book of the Year Awards” sponsored by ForeWord Magazine, a trade publication for independent booksellers.
The Odubiyis were in New York in June to accept the award and have stamped the honor on the newest editions of the book as a mark of industry credibility for Ilori, which is named after Sadé Odubiyi’s paternal grandmother.
‘‘For a small publisher, it’s pretty good vindication,” said Gail Kump, director of marketing for Midpoint Trade Books, Ilori’s New York-based distributor.
The Odubiyis came to a seminar held by Midpoint earlier this year, Kump said, and both their enthusiasm and Sadé Odubiyi’s quality of writing impressed.
‘‘That’s all you need,” Kump said.
Midpoint is anticipating the release next month of Odubiyi’s new book, ‘‘The Writer Behind the Words,” a nonfiction work offering advice and encouragement to aspiring authors. Kump hopes ‘‘Dara Girard” can become synonymous with romance novels and instructional books on writing.
‘‘We want to brand Dara,” she said.
After hundreds of rejections, it is a happy ending for Sadé Odubiyi, one Dara Girard herself could not have written better.
