Feeding my new friends to sharks.
YEAH! I have new friends. I like having new friends, they make me happy. My new friends write – often, and we share the same goals and dreams. The dream, however impossible, is to share our writing with the world. To be published. Having new friends that are new to the exclusive world of agents and publishers has inspired me to write a quick entry pointing them to a few great blogs that I scour every day.
Oh, and to point out something that took me all of about 5 minutes to realize upon meeting a few real live agents at the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Conference last year. Agents are people and they like writers. Yes, at the RMFW they were celebrities but that didn’t change them (much). They were fun, approachable and above all, helpful. Get your butt to a conference for corn sake.
Kristin Nelson from NLA – she is just downright amazing and on FIRE as an agent. She had 4 (I believe) books on the top ten NYT list last year – two at the same time. That’s pretty much unheard of. I met her at a conference and she was very approachable and dripping with advice. She also sent me a forum rejection letter for the query I sent her for my book. Good for her, it was premature.
http://queryshark.blogspot.com/
Before you query an agent YOU MUST READ THIS BLOG. It is fantastic. Janet Reid (agent) goes through actual queries sent to the Shark, with the writer’s permission of course, and gives us her unedited-stream of conscience- response to those queries. I love this blog and Janet happily displays her sharp teeth. I spent some time with her at RMFW and she was engaging and as brilliant in person as she appears in her many forms online. I keep my distance and respect the teeth of the Shark, but she has been known to make Twitter appearances@Janet_Reid and comment on the work of amazing and promising artist like @dusthansen
When/if you are ready to start submitting this website can be a huge resource. It currently has 1273 agents listed, 126 publishers and almost 25k registered users. The gig here is that it is a database that allows agents and more importantly authors publicly track their progress for queries sent. So if you want to see what Kristin Nelson has seen and rejected over the past 2 years, it’s pretty much up there. Of course it won’t have every single query contact listed but it’s a broad enough sample that you can get a pretty good picture of what she likes, when her busiest months are, when she trends to taking on new writers etc… Well worth it’s menial price of admittance.
http://askaliteraryagent.blogspot.com/
Noah Lukeman is fantastic. He wrote one of my favorite writing books The First Five Pages. You should have this book in your collection, whether you plan on getting published or not. His blog is also very direct and informative and it shows up in a FAQ form that is easy to navigate.
OK – that’s it for now. If you are seriously considering getting published you need start swimming in these waters. Get familiar with this world, start chatting on twitter and commenting on these blogs. You will be surprised how approachable this world can be, just beware of THE SHARK!
