Day 7 contained a great discussion about querying/the business of publishing, a mild sunburn, and a perilous walk along a freeway access road.
Since our critiques were complete for the week, Malinda devoted Saturday’s workshop time to a discussion of querying and other aspects of publishing. She turned over the reins to the two among us who already have agents. Her rationale for that was that they had queried more recently, and things have changed a lot since she initially queried her debut, Ash, in 2007.
M-E Girard gave us a detailed process that she used for querying, and also taught us how to be stealthy online stalkers. Fortunately, my online dating life before marriage allowed me to hone those skills to a frightfully advanced level. It’s kind of fun to have a reason to put them to use again. Here are my notes on M-E’s steps for query success:
- Finish your manuscript.
- Revise until it is the best you can make it on your own (beta readers and critique partners highly recommended).
- Write your query and have it reviewed/critiqued by your writer friends.
- Compile a list of agents that represent the genre you are querying and sort them into tiers by preference (5-10 agents per tier).
- STALK THEM ALL. But only on the internet. And stealthily.
- Develop a unique personalization based on the information you learned while stalking. But don’t be creepy (I struggle with this in all aspects of life).
- Create a query tracking system or use something like QueryTracker.
- Send your query to Tier 1 and sit back to gnaw your nails to the quicks while you wait for responses.
- If you don’t get any responses or only get rejections, your query is probably not working. Revise your query and get more feedback, then submit to Tier 2, Tier 3, etc.
It was strange and sad to leave our workshop room for the last time, though I won’t miss the smell of dirty socks that always seemed to permeate it. However, I had an adventure to head off to. A friend of mine from Austin picked me up to take me down to Santa Monica. We decided to grab something to eat and then walked down to the pier. I took a few pictures on our walk:
After our walk on the pier, my friend dropped me off to visit with my mentor from my day job. Hopefully my mentor has forgiven me for being completely feral by the time I saw her; work was but a distant dream after being out of the office for two weeks. We spent a couple of hours chatting in her beautiful back yard, which reminded me how much I love to be outside in places that aren’t Texas.
When it was finally time to head home, I caught the bus a few blocks from her house. The ride itself went relatively smoothly, but the stop at the end of my journey turned out to be on the opposite side of the highway from the campus. I walked across the overpass, but then the sidewalk disappeared, so I had to hoof it through the dirt or walk on the freeway access road for half a mile, which resulted in some dude shouting out his car to see if I needed a ride. I suppose it’s possible that he was trying to be polite, but signs on the bus had just warned me about the dangers of human trafficking in LA. Ending up in the trunk of a car bound up with duct tape alongside a bunch of weaponry didn’t seem like a good way to end the day.
I got back up to campus just in time for the farewell party, which was an epic affair involving plenty of cake, scotch, an open mic, and eventually karaoke. Everyone went completely batshit when Hold On by Wilson Phillips queued up, and the most majestic singalong of all time took place. I won’t post any pictures or video here to save your retinas and eardrums, but you can have your own little singalong to the original video:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIbXvaE39wM]
I still can’t believe the retreat is over. A piece of me got left behind in Los Angeles. Still, I’m excited to see what the future holds, and am so grateful for the connections I made that I know are going to be amazing friendships.
I have very much enjoyed your posts. Thanks for sharing!