In the grand scheme of things, writing the novel is supposed to be the hard part. Compared to writing my query letter, writing the novel felt normal. Easy. It took me just over two weeks of daily hacking at the keyboard (and, let’s be honest, more than a little bit of anguish) to get it right. I ended up running it by twice as many beta readers as my novel…
You know how they say you should never put anything smaller than your elbow in your ear? I know why. It’s because if you poke around in there with something that actually fits, like a q-tip, you might slip up and accidentally jab yourself in the eardrum. Which is really painful. Much like querying. You can see where I’m going with this. I’ve been racking my brain to come…
This week for The Debutante Ball, we’re sharing our journey to getting a literary agent, so I dug through the archives of my email outbox so you can experience truly and authentically the real realness of my querying process, before I landed the book deal for THEY COULD HAVE NAMED HER ANYTHING. WARNING: THERE ARE TWO PARTS OF THIS BLOG POST. THIS IS STORY #1. Read this story to be…
If you want to be traditionally published by a Big 5 publisher, you need a literary agent. And in order to get an agent, you’re going to have to write a query letter. There’s no getting around it. The others have talked about the importance of the query. But I’m going to get into the nitty gritty about how to write a good one, and I’ll use my query for THE…
Ah. Query Letters. It is well known that most writers would rather churn out an entire book written in their own blood than write a one-page query letter. Penning this stupid letter might sound simple, but trust me, it’s hard. You are given a measly few paragraphs to sum up your book and yourself, and in these paragraphs you must sound compelling and unique and hooky enough for an agent…
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…
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…
Note: this week, we are discussing the process of landing a literary agent. For anyone unfamiliar with this torturous process, it involves writing a one-page letter, describing your book and yourself, in which you are supposed to entice, or at least not frighten, the agent. You wanna talk about the sting of rejection? Settle in, child. I am the patron saint of awful query letters. In the beginning, I tried…
My path to publication had a few detours, pit stops & unexpected turns. But here I am: months away from my book babe hitting shelves. And, I can enthusiastically say my agent, Stacey Glick, is the mastermind behind my dream coming to fruition. I’ll prove it with a quick look at my journey (my second journey, to be honest, because I was previously agented for a different project), starting with my query…
Ah, the query. The most important 500 words you’ll ever write. Oh, man, I wish that were an overstatement. Here you are, a newly minted novelist, having finally finished your book with all its delicately chosen words and its delicious plotting that unfolds languorously over 350 pages like an origami butterfly, and now you have to turn into a brazen huckster who crams a hard sell into one single-spaced page….
