Monday, September 13, 2010

Home, briefly

We just got back from Scotland, Saturday night, and fly out to Spain tomorrow. This'll be our last chance to fly with just the three of us. In a few months, there will be four!

While I was out, the rejection letters piled up in my email. Actually, I only got two. One was for my novel from Deseret Book, the other was the reply to a query from an agent (one collects a lot of those, quite often). Now I need to decide whether I keep subbing to the LDS market, or retune the novel for the national market. I am leaning towards the latter, as the LDS market is quite small and the publishing practices well out of sync with the national market. Many publishers seem used to dealing with starry eyed newbies who are so excited to get published they'll sign any contract, and while I don't have an enormous list of publishing credits, I've been at this long enough that I just don't fall into that category. And I've seen enough good publishing contracts to not have much time for bad ones.

But now I need to also prepare my chick lit novel for agent subs. My trunk of novels is getting rather full here, due to the fact that I despise writing query letters. It's an art in and of itself, and I don't feel all that good at it, so it's always a letdown after I've written a novel to have to work on selling it. At times like this, it's healthy to tell yourself all of the reasons why it might not sell, but that's depressing too!

This time around, I'm taking several weeks to work just on the query letter, and Trevor will be helping me out. We took a good long look at my writing and decided that this is the main roadblock I need to clear, right now. I could just wait for lightning to strike and an agent to pick me up with a so-so query letter, but that's not the smart way to proceed.

So, here we go...

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