Ingredients of Successful Fiction: If Your Novel Doesn’t Sell, Consider This
From an agent’s perspective, selling fiction can be exciting, just plain fun or heartbreaking. Exciting because I can’t wait to tell editors about a story that moved me or kept me on the edge of my seat, characters I can’t forget, a setting that resonates, language that soars. Fun because fiction can be so engaging. […]
So you are a debut novelist…
I was thrilled this week to make a 2-book deal with Kensington Publishing for first time author, Kerstin March. I think this happy ending can be instructive for debut novelists, especially those writing mainstream women’s fiction or genre fiction, so I thought I’d share a little bit about how this came to be. Kerstin came […]
Book of the Week: LIES BENEATH by Anne Greenwood Brown
Make Summer last just a little longer with this fast-paced tale of murderous mermaids in Lake Superior by the lovely Anne Greenwood Brown. Calder White lives in the cold, clear waters of Lake Superior, the only brother in a family of murderous mermaids. To survive, Calder and his sisters must prey on humans and absorb […]
Learning from Rejection
Inevitably, no matter how strong or enticing a new project might be, I know that when I go out to sell, rejection is part of the process. It can be discouraging. No sooner do I contact editors, who often sound enthusiastic about considering a proposal or manuscript, then almost immediately, some “passes” stream in. As […]
Book of the Week: Main Street Vegan, Victoria Moran
Author and holistic health practitioner, Victoria Moran started eating only plants nearly thirty years ago, raised her daughter Adair a vegan from birth, and maintains a sixty-pound weight loss. In Main Street Vegan: Everything You Need to Know to Eat Healthfully and Live Compassionately in the Real Word, Moran, writing with her daughter shows us […]
Carving Out a Narrative from a Sea of Fascinating Details – On Writing History by Joseph Kelly
I fell into this book sideways. A long time ago, I wrote a short article for the Encyclopedia of the Irish in America, and I was hooked by the strange life of John England, the first Catholic bishop of Charleston. Raised in Cork, Ireland, this prickly champion of Catholic emancipation stuck like a thorn in […]
Shumaker
Heather Shumaker’s unconventional parenting book, It’s OK Not to Share…And Other Renegade Rules for Raising Competent and Compassionate Kids, has prompted parents and preschool teachers to throw away their timers and buy wrestling mats instead. Families call it “life changing.” Parents magazine book reviewer calls it “Brilliant…An enlightening book that will make you take a second look at everything you believe” and named it one of the Best Parenting Books of 2012
When to Send Out an Agent Query
The ease of email queries, which most agencies accept, has resulted in writers sending queries to agents at all times of year and hours of the day.The assumption is (I think) that it’s OK to send out queries at odd times because we agents can read them whenever we like. The reality, for this agent […]
Read of the Week: RIDDLE IN STONE, Robert Evert
I took on Robert Evert’s Riddle in Stone trilogy in part because I fell in love with his hapless protagonist, a stuttering overweight librarian. The trilogy is classic fantasy of the best sort, and like good epic fantasy, it is also about the making of a hero, in this case, an improbable hero who goes […]
To Blurb or Not to Blurb? Elaine Neil Orr
Author Elaine Neil Orr (Author of A Different Sun: A Novel of Africa and Gods of Noonday: A White Girl’s African Life) offered us this guest post on blurbing, and other thoughts of generosity after your book comes out. Thank you, Elaine! Subsequent to my first book’s appearance (a memoir), I began to receive requests for […]