Lovers of Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird book about her writing life, rush to the DVD store tomorrow. Docurama Films is bringing out Bird By Bird With Annie, a documentary (“portrait” according to the box cover) about the writer, whose Bird By Bird is often listed as one of the favorite books on writing. Look…
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After writing, for my query letter, a description for my novel that I was pretty happy with, I didn’t quite get the feedback I was hoping for from my critique group. The general feeling was that the paragraph was fine, but nothing special. Well, if you’ve been reading this blog over the past couple weeks, you’ll…
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I finally finished researching the 124 agents AgentQuery.com came up with as representing middle grade books and have made a list of close to 30 who I think will be a) great to work with based on their blog posts and interviews and b) could be interested in my book based on the books they…
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Yesterday I wrote about Lynn Viehl’s journey to the New York Times bestseller list and how it reminded me that persistence is one of the most important things to have when pursuing a writing career. Last night, as I was doing more research on prospective agents, I found two posts that tell anecdotes that prove…
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After all this talk about book advances lately, here’s something about the other side of the coin: royalties. Author Lynn Viehl posted on the GenReality blog, in which she’s a member, detailing her first royalty statement after getting on the New York Times bestseller list. This isn’t Viehl’s first book, but it’s her first to reach the NY…
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I’ve spent the entire weekend — on and off in between a few social engagements — investigating literary agents. And I feel as though my head is spinning. First off, I do have an agent who I’ve been following for a while and plan to submit to. I saw her talk in two seminars a couple…
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Ok, so I haven’t been offered an advance for my book yet. I’m still working on a brilliant (I hope) query letter to sell the book. But, there have been a couple interesting Web stories/posts in the last few days about book advances, and it’s something that even yet-to-be-published authors should know about. So, back in March,…
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Literary agent Nathan Bransford has a contest on his blog this week. On Monday, he posted 50 query letters from real writers. Five are from published works (with the names changed, of course) and the rest are either fake or real from writers who volunteered their queries for the contest. The game is Be An…
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In numerous conference seminars, I’ve heard that one of the best ways to prepare to write a query letter is to read the jacket flap copy on books that are similar to yours. So, I spent about four hours in a bookstore this weekend doing just that. It was a very useful and interesting exercise.…
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I found another great link on query letter writing, this time from author Jackie Kessler on the Deadline Dames blog. Jackie graciously provides the query letter that got her 11 requests for the full manuscript, then five offers of representation. Within a week after she chose which agent to sign with, her book, Hell’s Belles,…
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