My signings are listed at http://www.maggiedana.com (click on the link for 'news & events'). There are 4 bookshop and 2 library events, plus a couple of writers' workshops and 2 informal (drop-in) signings.
And I whole-heartedly agree about a gaping hole in women's fiction. I've been whingeing about this for years, and am glad to see it's slowly getting filled, but not nearly fast enough for my taste!
Small note of interest here: If you want to be published by a major fiction house, you need an agent because publishers will only accept submissions from agented authors. Getting an agent is tough, and getting tougher. It's not like hiring a real estate or insurance agent where all you have to do is pick up the phone and ask. A literary agent has to be won over by brilliant writing and a manuscript he or she can't bear to put down.
As for my own potholed path to publication ... it's been a convoluted, often frustrating, frequently infuriating, yet ultimately rewarding journey that began in the 1980s when I got my start by writing books for kids, 7 of which were published (it was a little easier to find a publisher in those far-off days).
Then life got in the way. I started a typesetting business, steered my 3 kids through college, survived breast cancer, moved 1200 miles from my home in Connecticut down to Alabama for 2 years to help my son and his wife cope with a toddler and premature twins, returned home to pick up the threads of normal life again, and so on, and I didn't fire up my keyboard again till the summer of 1999, when a friend challenged me to write the sort of book I was always complaining there weren't enough of.
In the 10 years since I began it, my novel has undergone more facelifts than the QE2, including (in no particular order) 2 agents, 3 title changes, and 4 major revisions that chopped its original 180,000 words in half. It has been scrapped and rewritten from the ground up in a different tense and POV, with a brand new plot and enough new characters to fill a phone book. It has been submitted by aforementioned agents to a dozen editors in New York and come close, but not close enough, with a couple of them, and it has lived in a box beneath my bed for months on end while I tried to pretend I didn’t care if it ever got published.
Finally, just over a year ago, I decided to give it one more shot by submitting it myself to Macmillan New Writing in the UK, a new imprint at Macmillan that actually accepts manuscripts directly from authors. So I fired it off, then settled down to wait and, being a pragmatist, I prepared myself for yet another disappointment.
So you can imagine my surprise when, two months later, I got the email all authors dream of: "We love your novel and would like to publish it." It arrived as I was about to drive north to my daughter's house to help celebrate her birthday. I replied to the email: YES, PLEASE!!!! and printed it out, then gave it to my daughter as an extra birthday present. We both danced around her kitchen, laughing and crying. Her kids thought we'd gone barmy.
So, in answer to your question: How many publishing houses did you have to approach before someone agreed to publish it? the answer is, "I've pretty much lost track," but if you mean How many publishing houses did I personally submit it to? then the answer is 'only one,' but that was at the tail end of a very long path filled with many, many potholes.