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…
If you’ve reached the querying stage of the publication process: Congratulations! You wrote and edited a book. (You did edit it, didn’t you? A lot? Good.) You’re ready to send your baby out into the world, and that can be thrilling and exciting. This stage can also be totally overwhelming. I dealt with some of the chaos by keeping a running spreadsheet of who I queried and when I queried…
A tale of a book, from pen to shelf: November 2011 — Project begins, called simply Aven, as Cass’s 2011 NaNoWriMo project, an attempt to get herself writing creatively again after several years devoted to academia. December 2011 — Cass sets to finishing the draft and polishing it up. July 2012 — Cass scrambles to finish editing her draft in the hopes that it’s fit to be seen and attends a…
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…
This week the Debs are sharing stories about their agents, editors and or publishers. Note, this is a repost of a blog post I wrote on Sep. 26, but fit perfectly for this week’s Deb topic. A few months ago, I wrote a big long article on the Grub Street blog on how long it took me to find an agent and how I eventually connected with the amazing Amaryah Orenstein at…
If you’re interested in the business of publishing and getting an agent, I’ve got a post over on my personal blog about how I got an agent. But here I’d like to talk a little more broadly about what an agent does for a writer, and what that means for us in all of our careers and lives. Uncle Wiki tells me this is what literary agents do: A literary…
