A Glimmer of Success

Yesterday, an agent asked to see my full manuscript for the first time. Mind you, I have sent out hundreds of queries for my five novels. 

Let me be honest -- I have sent out queries for books that I hadn't sent through developmental edit or beta reading. I have sent out queries not knowing how to write a query letter. I have, rightly, gotten rejections.

I have learned a lot from my failures. The visual above doesn't really show the road to success because it doesn't incorporate learning from failure. One can work hard but wrong, and all that effort means nothing. 

This is not to say that I will get an agent out of this. I could get rejected by the other 27 agents I have queries out to. The agent who has my manuscript might pass. Hard work and learning from failures may not be enough. The book might just be "not what we're looking for".

But it's a glimmer of hope, a glimmer of success. I'll take it.

Frivolous Questions about Agents and Publishers No One Will Ask (Personal)

NOTE: I have not found the publisher or agent yet. I'm just daydreaming.
ALSO NOTE: I would never wear the heels pictured above.


Daydreams:
I daydream about the two outcomes I'd really like to see in my novel-writing: finding an agent and getting published. And like any pragmatic (and neurotic) person, I have questions:

I Have Important Questions!
1) Do you actually meet in person with your agent? Do you have to fly there or will they visit you on your turf? (A working lunch in New York City sounds better than one at the local steakhouse, but that's just me.) Who pays for the plane ticket? Can my husband come with me?

2) What do you wear to meet your agent? Do you dress for business? Business casual? Eccentric writer? Should I get my nails done in a French manicure or go for the power red?

3) Same questions as 1) and 2) but for a publisher. 

4) I know the part where you run contracts past an entertainment lawyer. But how can you tell an entertainment lawyer's good at what they do? (There's one in my area, so I hope he's good).

#SFFpit and the Concept of the Pitch Contest (Social Media, Writer Development)

I found another pitch contest on Twitter, which reminds me of why #WritingCommunity Twitter is so valuable. This one is called #SFFPit, and is specific to science fiction and fantasy books.


What's a Pitch Contest?
In a pitch contest, a writer of a completed and unpublished work distills the essence of their book into a Twitter-sized pitch. The author has the opportunity to pitch their book (using a different pitch each hour to get past Twitter algorithms) once an hour for a set number of hours. The purpose of this is to attract potential agents and publishers, who will ask for a query to further judge your work. 

Pitches should illuminate the character, their desires, obstacles to their desire, and the consequences of failure. Be specific of the consequences! Also, all pitches need to have #SFFpit in their body and use other designated hashtags for genre and audience. (Koboldt, 2020). 

See more details here!

Koboldt, D. (2020). #SFFpit. Available: http://dankoboldt.com/sffpit/#sffpit-rule-changes [January 20 2020)

Trying too hard

It's Sunday morning over very good coffee (Bub's Blend, a limited edition coffee by L'il Bub; full of science and magic), and it's a good moment to philosophize.

My topic: The seeming paradox of my weight loss. To fill in, I lost 63 pounds over a year and a half period eating a well-balanced 1350: 1500 calories a day, and then I stopped. My plateau has lasted for over a year, so I went to my doctor who referred me to a healthy lifestyles specialist. His words: "It's possible that you're not eating enough."

I go to the specialist, and she has me breathe through this funky machine for ten minutes, and tells me "You aren't eating enough." She raised my calorie goal to 1633 (yeah, odd number) and reminded me I need to exercise, too. I have lost over two pounds in the past four days.

So let me wax philosophical: Is it possible to try too hard? That was my problem with my weight loss; although in my defense, I didn't know that I wasn't eating enough. I didn't know that adding a little more nutrition would nurture my body.

So, in what ways am I trying too hard? That's an interesting question, and one I think I need to ask myself about my writing. When have I edited enough? When can I accept that my work is good enough even if agents aren't biting on it?

A very good question, and one I will be exploring...

The Plan

I have a plan for how I'm going to handle the whole querying thing. Bear with me:

1. I will continue dev editing and re-editing my existent books one at a time because that's just good practice wherever I'm published.
2. I will wait for six months for this querying cycle on Prodigies to complete, researching self-publishing and self-marketing as I go.
3. If at the end of those six months I don't have any takers, I will self-publish Prodigies. You will hear a lot about this and hopefully you will read it. :)
4. I will query other books as they get edited -- Voyageurs will probably be the second book in the pipeline, followed by Apocalypse. And so on.

This plan doesn't include writing. I have not written since I finished Whose Hearts are Mountains, which I am sure needs serious dev editing as do the others.  That's only been a month and a half. I haven't been inspired to write lately, but there are various directions I could go -- a sequel to Prodigies, a sequel to Voyageurs, another book in the Archetype series, a faerie adventure/romance novel ... I have enough books that need to go through the dev cycle, though, that I wouldn't have to write for a while. But I don't want to get rusty.

I am hoping, of course, that this hard work pays off. I don't know why I'm getting rejections from agents except for the usual "...I'm very selective ... I don't know if I can represent this novel with the enthusiasm it deserves." (Question: If it deserves enthusiasm, why aren't you -- oh, never mind.) But at least I have a plan so that I'm not at the mercy of judgments about "what sells". I just know that I write for a reason, and I want to see what that reason is.

Making it hard to hope

I just got a rejection less than twenty minutes after I handed it in. It didn't "make her passionate". She only took on "select clients". Hopefully someone else would "take me on". This is where the brutality of sending queries comes in, when the agent sends back something that sounds condescending. I could just cry.

I've received two same-day rejections from my latest 3-a-day query sendouts. That's a little hard on my system, although at the same time I appreciate not waiting. Someone once told me that querying is a lot like dating -- you have to face a lot of rejections.

I've had to face a lot of rejections in dating -- A LOT. In the days before wingmen, there was no buddy to woo the -- oops, now I remember the really dimunitive circus acrobat who showed me his 12-page Bulgarian drivers' license while his taller comrade tried to woo my tall, blonde, vivacious roommate Kristy and our other roommate, Beth, cleaned up the pool table like the pool shark she was. (Yes, that sentence should be read all in one breath, because that's how it happened.) That was a true wingman. And he was cute, but I wasn't into one-night stands in a performer's train berth.

College stories aside, back to the topic of rejection. I have lots of practice in accepting rejection from the dating side of things. Some guys gave me nice rejections -- "If I were straight, I'd date you". Some gave me mean rejections -- "You're fat. You must have a self-esteem problem."

I've had lots of rejections for jobs too. The nicest one told me who they hired, and she had 20 years experience and a textbook under her belt. The most frustrating one basically said they couldn't find a qualified candidate for their consumer -- or family -- or whatever -- faculty job despite 206 applicants.

I have about 12 queries out now -- oops, ten -- and I send three out every day. I will send 72 out by the time I'm done. And if this time is like last time, I will have 72 rejections. Some rejections are form letters. Some are really nice, and I wonder if those are form letters as well. All of them tell me to keep trying.

I keep trying under the assumption that I haven't found the right agent yet. And if I keep trying, I will find the right agent. I accept that my writing style and ideas aren't necessarily simple enough for genre fiction (like science fiction and fantasy), but maybe too non-mainstream for literary fiction. I'm in an odd place.

As a Friend (Quaker), I believe that I am called by the Divine to write secular books about fighting societal ills in the present, but set in a near future with fantastic elements. I'm called to write, but maybe for a purpose that has nothing to do with getting published. I don't know. But if the world needs my novel, as NaNoWriMo believes, I need an agent.

Thank You, Readers

Last night, I gathered the courage to send some queries out to agents, and I have you, the readers, to thank. 

For the non-writers out there, think of a query as a "please consider me" package, which basically consists of a cover letter, a synopsis of one's novel, and a sample of the manuscript. Different agents have different rules for what they want in the query, so no two queries are the same.

Agents take care of the business end of being a novelist -- providing assistance for editing and marketing, sending queries to publishers, arranging book signings, and hectoring the author to write more novels. Many publishers won't take queries unless sent by an agent.  Authors generally don't like to mess with the business end of being a novelist, so they treat finding an agent as a blessing.

Because agents get paid from the a percentage proceeds of novel sales, they will not take on an author who they perceive will not sell books. When an author rejects a manuscript, they're saying they don't trust it to sell in the markets they serve.  This, of course, is based on the agent's opinion rather than actual metrics about what kind of books sell. This means the author keeps sending queries until either they find an agent or give up.

I had been on the verge of giving up.  I have racked up about 20 rejections in the five years I've been writing. Much of it was my fault, because I didn't know how to polish my writing ("Looks fine to me") and out of sheer arrogance ("What do you mean this novel doesn't fit your standards?!") Some of it, I suspect, was my subject matter -- the novel I sent out involves an ecocollective, a power-hungry corporation, alternative belief systems, and a semi-sentient bean vine named JB. Oh, and I forgot the love affair between a 20-year-old man and an older woman who doesn't want to be a cougar.

What made me decide to send out some queries to some more adventurous agents? You, my readers, and the ability to write for you have helped me decide to risk rejection again.

Thank you.