because I am not reading anything.
I'm sitting around, emo-ing and whinging about deadline.
This is a list of websites for folks who want to write and sell their work.
If you read the archives of these blogs, the whole 'New York publishing world archetype' will take form in your mind. You can become one with the publishing process.
This is like the Navajo hunter visualizing his prey before he hunts.
Miss Snark here. Later here.
Pub Rants here.
Agency Gatekeeper here.
Evil Editor here.
Bookends here
Rants and Ramblings here.
Dystel & Goderich here.
Et in arcadeia here.
And is visualizing my prey all I need to do? Then shoot the dart of my query letter at them? Ohhh, I hope it works someday...
ReplyDeleteI am quite sure it cannot hurt.
ReplyDeleteDo not literary agents and editors eat bagels like the rest of us? Do they not put on their bluejeans one leg at a time? Surely the knowledge of our shared humanity makes the query process less painful.
For we are all trapped upon the wheel of life, even if some of us get to say, "Hah! Take your miserable query back and tear it into tiny pieces and put it in the bottom of your hamster cage. I thumb my nose in its general drection."
Thank you. Yes. We absolutely eat bagels (in rather large quantities, in my case) and do put on our jeans (or slacks or trousers or leggings) one leg at a time. We really are just like you.
ReplyDeleteAnd are unlikely to ask you to tear your query into small pieces/stop writing/anything like that. If anything, working within the industry gives us an even greater appreciation for how incredibly subjective the whole business is.
I'm amazed that some books get representation/enormous advances/sell at all; I'm also amazed that some works don't. So we all know that we, ourselves, are not the be all, end all.
That's why there are so many of us. We vary widely in our tastes and business senses, thus ensuring that it's often simply a matter of finding the right agent for your work.
That's what I'd want folks in the midst of the query process to focus on. Ten refusals or twenty or even thirty doesn't mean the work is not good or even that the work is not commercial.
ReplyDeleteIt may just mean the work hasn't landed in the right hands yet.