For writers, it’s always important that we are actively reading and making connections between our work to other authors who write along similar themes or styles. It’s not at all an insult for someone to say, “Your writing feels like this author”, or “It reminds me of this other book I read in the past” because, as a writer, your work should, in at least some ways, follow a lineage,…
So, you want to query an agent, huh? It’s a gamble, yet an exciting one, dear writing, fishing with your art as bait. You must 1) catch the attention of an agent and 2) entice/persuade them into giving you a longer look as a potential client and money maker. The publishing industry is all about the money, but the more knowledge you have before you dive in, the better off…
This week, the Deb Ball is interviewing industry pros who aren’t authors, to give y’all a bit of a view of the rest of this wild publishing world. I decided, since he’s used to me pestering him for odd things, to ask my spectacular agent, Connor Goldsmith, if he’d tell the Deb Ball readership a little about the mysterious workings of his role: Tell us your tale! Who are you,…
Here’s where I was standing when I got The Call from Connor Goldsmith: Yeah. It was kind of a bonkers day. But my life has often seemed a strange and haphazard thing, so it only seems appropriate that one of the most significant moments of it should also be one of the most surreal. It’s actually not out of character at all. I seem destined to have important conversations in…
Back when I was engaged in the humbling process of querying, I held a keen interest in other people’s publication stories, especially if they were full of initial angst and failure. I wanted to know this: how long did it take, and how hard was it? Because for me, it took forever, and it was hard as hell. I can state with confidence that all debut writers are intensely…
This week, we’re discussing how we found and landed our agents. I started my search in early 2013, after about six months of editing the manuscript I’d finished the previous summer. We’re doing a week on query letters and the querying process later in the year, so I’ll spare you that gore for now, except to drop this truth: query letters are the devil. Once I’d beaten the query letter…
I followed my agent’s blog, Adventures in Agentland, long before I knew she’d be the one! Natalie Lakosil’s awesome site, named one of the best sites for writers by Writer’s Digest, is chuck full of helpful tips on querying, manuscript revisions, character development, and marketing. One of the main sites I revisited to understand how agents “think,” improving my chances for my book to be sold. I particularly enjoy when she…
I signed with my awesome agent Natalie in June of 2014. She was the best birthday present I could have ever hoped for! Especially after the six months it took to land her. New Year’s Day, I made the commitment to myself to find an agent for my work in progress novel. It had already been given the thumbs down by several agents and I was feeling defeated. But that year,…
This week the Debs are sharing stories about how they found their agent, plus giving advice on querying and the process of landing your own agent. The topic for this week happened to coincide with another column I write, for the GrubStreet writing center’s blog. Last week, I wrote a big long post on how long it took me to find an agent and how I eventually connected with the amazing…
The sales cycle for I LIKED MY LIFE went like this: edit, send to a handful of publishers, collect rejections, err, I mean feedback, repeat. We were on round three of this daunting process when I sent my agent—the amazing Elizabeth Winick Rubinstein—my latest revision. I no longer obsessed about when I’d hear back, exactly who’d be pitched, etc. I’d come to peace with my always-the-bridesmaid-never-the-bride lot as a writer….
