The hurricane has passed New York City and the literary agents are free to head off to the Hamptons for the weekend, without fear of being rained out.
No queries are being read, by and large. It's the end of the summer being mourned, and grief over the coming of winter is occupying every mind.
It's a good time for authors in search of representation to get their submissions together and send them off via snail mail where appropriate. The e-mail submission should be stored away in the drafts folder, ready to go on Tuesday.
However, you would want to check the agent's website to be sure they're accepting queries and verify that the end of summer holiday isn't extended into the following week.
Newcomers to the query game won't know that, you see, and they'll end up on the black list while you earn points for style. Every little bit helps, especially when unemployment is high and there's a crowd thinking they could write a book to make a buck it's so easy and they're wasting the agents' valuable time while your well-done query gets a brief glance by someone in a foul mood.
The window of opportunity is opening, and it's only open until Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays come around. Let the querying begin.
4 comments:
She's baaaaaaack! I've just completed my monthly run through your posts, working backwards. (I know, I'm bad. I'm still trying to come up with an intelligent post for my website).
Believe it or not, I actually sold 13 books in the two weeks the book has been on Amazon! (Yes, it helps to torture friends) That put me from 179,000 ranking to 359,000. Woohoo! and %*^#%$. It really is such a farce, all fueled by our imagination. But pay no attention to my cynicism. It's time you get that publisher with that nice advance and budget for publicity. Well, get the publisher anyway.
The whole querying and writing thing has become a hobby, and like all hobbies, I find that I enjoy it. Which makes me quite the masochist, yes?
Big publishers have the marketing budget, which we don't. Sure, you could hire a publicist, but we don't have that kind of money.
Several years ago I read about a very wealthy woman who wanted to publish so she did it herself and took out a big advert in the NYT book section. I suppose she sold a few more copies that way, but I don't know what kind of succcess she had.
If I had the money for an advert, I'd spend it on airfare and go visit the old folks back home.
They have big budgets only for their pet writers; yah know, the ones with the platform, MFA (or something like that...), journalists, actor cousins, etc. Otherwise, you're on your own. As for marketing, this is as much money as i intend to spend on this nonesense, and a publicist is just another con artist as far as I am concerned (do I sound too cynical?)
And speaking of $$$ for advert and publicist--sorry folks! It went for airfare to visit friends. Great minds think alike.
A publicist can get you attention but how would you sell enough books (low profit margins) to cover the expense?
At least your book is out there and not gathering dust. Better if one person reads it than no one.
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