Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Back to the grind

While I try to decide which project to write next, I've resumed sending out agent submissions for my romance/women's fiction/chick lit/whatever it is novel. It doesn't fit squarely into any of those categories. I expected to look in Sonar (the software I use to track submissions) and be immediately depressed with how many subs I'd already done, but actually, that didn't happen. I didn't do as many as I'd thought, so I have a ton more work to do.

Each agent, I research by Googling their name and reading any interviews they've done. Sometimes, actually quite often, they'll post their idea of the ideal pitch letter, so I always tailor mine accordingly. It's a lot of work, but it's also the sort of thing that's worth doing right if it's worth doing at all. Yet if I tallied up all the hours I spend doing this and divide my total writing income by that number... yeah... you've got to make a lot of money before you can claim a decent hourly rate. Definitely not the career for people who want to get rich quick!

Today I did a bunch of submissions to agents that are a stretch. I don't submit to agents who plainly wouldn't be interested in what I've written. That would be a waste of time. These, however, were to agents who define their interests so broadly that it's a little hard to tell what they'd want. Tomorrow I'll resume with ones who plainly want the kind of genre I've written. I usually do one to four queries a day, and not every day. I find it's less daunting that way. Once I've got a certain number out, I take a break to let the responses come back and then adjust my pitch based on those, if they provide feedback.

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