Even Anna Ghosh of Scovil Chichak Galen did not send her usual auto-response. Every other time that I queried her, I would get one of those verification messages that were tied in with her spam filter. Last night I shot off a query and waited for the return so that I could verify that I was not spamming, but nothing ever came. I have to wonder if my e-mail box is working.
After browsing through this weeks' deals list at
Two debut sales are listed. The first one:
Co-author of He's Just Not That into You Liz Tuccillo's HOW TO BE SINGLE, to Greer Hendricks at Atria, for publication in spring 2007, by Andrea Barzvi at ICM (world).
That's not much of a debut, considering the fact that the author has been published before and has some sort of track record. The second, and final, debut offering comes from a high school English teacher.
Now, I'm not a teacher, I only studied English in high school. But being a teacher is a much better credential than being a former student. No matter how you cut it, it takes credentials to get published these days. Agents are looking for a 'platform' for the author to stand on and shout from, because it's all about sales and marketing.
So, in between sending queries, working on the next novel, and, oh, say, earning a living, we should all be furiously churning out short stories and firing them off to literary rags. Throw enough words on the wall and surely some of them will stick.
As a side note, I had given up on Kathleen Anderson and Jill Grinberg, who had yet to respond to the queries I sent last November. Getting around the additional postage issue, I got a blanket rejection from Kathleen Anderson via e-mail - to an old account I stopped using because the spammers got hold of it. The SASEs I used won't be of much use with those .37 stamps - so what will Anderson/Grinberg do with them? Donate them to charity?
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