If you want to sell your book to a major New York publisher, you need an agent, no question. As with anything in life, there are rare exceptions, but do you want to drastically narrow your chances in hopes of winning the lottery? If so, why? A good agent has relationships with editors and publishers, they know who’s looking for what, they know how to sell a book, they know how to negotiate a good contract, and
Read MoreYou’re trying to juggle a dozen things at once – an unforgettable first line, a fresh voice, an original theme, complex characters, mood and tone and conflict and a sense of mystery, and so on and so forth. In so doing, there’s a good chance you’ve inadvertently lost the most important element of all – clarity.
Read MoreOnce upon a time, I was a magazine editor with an inbox full of pitches from writers and publicists. Many of the senders probably submitted those queries and imagined me waiting for them to come in, reading through each one carefully to decide whether or not it had merit.
Here’s what was really on my mind each time a new pitch pinged through:
Read MoreRejection sucks. Writer’s block sucks. Burnout sucks. And yet, they’re all part of the job. Below are some super quick and simple exercises designed to make you feel creative, capable, and alive.
Read MoreRejection is a cost of doing business. This is true not only for writers and other creatives but for anyone courageous enough to live wholeheartedly.
You can minimize it by
Read MoreI spend a lot of time encouraging writers to reach into their hearts and get out of their heads (those inner critics are serious assholes). Only, there does come a time to unleash your intellect. That time is called revision.
These are my own tried and true techniques for revising without getting overwhelmed.
Read MoreWhen being turned down by literary journals and literary agents and magazines and book publishers, my grad school friends and I would console ourselves by saying, “at least we’re not trying to make it as models.”
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