Lit agents and publishers often release (or make posts to) a Manuscript Wish List. I figure turnabout is fair play, don't you ( Read more... )

This is by far my least favorite part of the process. Yesterday I likened it to cleaning all the toilets in Grand Central Station with my tongue ( Read more... )

Thanks to my partner anais aka Cassandra, my synopsis has been whittled down to a tolerable size ( Read more... )

"List some books that are similar to yours. (500 characters or less)" reads the query manager entry for both Kristin Nelson and Stephanie Rostan, two professional literary agents ( Read more... )

Derek is genderqueer, or nonbinary -- or rather that's likely what Derek would call himself in 2023 -- but it's 1982, and 23-year-old Derek is finding it a challenge to explain to people. He views himself as needing help becoming a better communicator. His parents view him as having a drug and alcohol problem ( Read more... )

I'm doing a fifth pass (give or take) of Within the Box, revamping some confusing or inexact paragraphs and redoing dialog that doesn't quite fit the character who is speaking at the time ( Read more... )

I've started sending out my pitch to get my second book published.

Here is my standard query letter, and below that, the parts of the formal proposal that spell out in more detail what the book is about.

Query Letter:

"When you're a fish out of water you look for the nearest ocean" - Anthony T. Hincks

THAT GUY IN OUR WOMEN'S STUDIES CLASS is a ( Read more... )

Originality has its limits; to make sense to people, we have to begin in familiar territory; to say something new, we must connect it with something people already know ( Read more... )

I was going to send out some query letters but Optimum Online was having an outage, so I thought I'd compose a blog post about the querying process instead.

The core piece of the process is the pitch or query letter, which is going to be the leadoff part of nearly every query that gets sent out. Authors interested in getting their books published ( Read more... )

In order to get published, promoted, distributed, represented, featured, etc, you first need to have a critical mass of people paying attention to what you're saying. People begin taking you seriously enough to pay attention to you once they realize that other people, not just themselves, are encountering what you've written or said, which in turn ( Read more... )