A Tale of Publishing, Part II

This was supposed to be a short, straightforward entry about the query process, and then something very important, and interesting for bad reasons, came to my attention.

The query process can be frustrating. It is sort of universally acknowledged as awful, terrible, degrading, deflating, and discouraging. It can be all those things. But it doesn't have to be. 

I found the query process to be exciting and encouraging. It took me years to find my agent, but along the way I had enough requests and interest to let me know that I had solid ideas, and writing that could be polished into something publishable, if I just kept working. Of course, I got many more nos than yeses. Way, way more. But every request for a full or a partial, every "please send more" was enough of a boost to keep me going through all the polite declines. 

EVERYONE gets nos. 

In fact, I wore my first No as a badge of honor. I printed it out and tacked it over my desk. Every writer in the bookshop has been rejected. Even the published hear nos. The nos never end. 

It's just part of the business. 

How you respond to the nos is entirely up to you. 

Be a little peeved, consider it part of the process, and shake it off. 

Or, take a moment to be understandably disappointed, have a cookie, or a glass of wine, or a stiff shot of whiskey, fire up the laptop and find another agent to query. 

But what any querying writer definitely doesn't want to do is create a blog and then write extensive, snarky dissections of each agent that rejects the work. Last week, it came to the attention of the Twitterverse that someone was doing just this thing. I'm sure there are others.
Just - don't do this. 

Maybe the best advice for writers just setting out on their journey is to plan their response to rejection. Have a comforting ritual all lined up for when the inevitable happens.  Because there's no use getting angry and mean. It does no good. It can't help the process, or the writing, or the eventual career of the writer in question. 

Agents aren't in the business to be big 'ol meanies. They are not the dentist from Little Shop of Horrors. They're in the business because they love books, and writers, and are willing to help you with your career for free for possibly years before you might sell a book. They are on our side, fellow writers. We're all in this together. 

A Tale of Publishing, Part I

This morning, an enormous padded envelope arrived on my doorstep, containing the first printed pages of The Star Thief. For those who don't know (as I didn't, until just a few months ago) at some point before your manuscript becomes a book, all the pages are formatted, printed out, and sent to the writer for a proofread. I don't print out working drafts of my manuscripts. I've only done it once, at the request of the agent. So to see the work as a physical thing, rather than just a file on a computer, is super exciting!

As I get closer to The Star Thief being a real live book, I've decided to go back and do a few posts about how I got here, from the beginning.

I'm one of those writers who's been crafting stories since I could hold a pencil. But when it came time for college, I picked theater and fine art instead of English as a major. Still, by the time graduation rolled around, I was starting to think I really wanted to try writing something for publication.

But... what???

I did very little writing in college, simply because I didn't know what I wanted to write about. So I did what you should do when you want to write, I started reading as much as I could. I graduated in spring 2002, and then got married at the end of the summer. On the way home from my honeymoon, I picked up a few books in the airport. One was the paperback of Prisoner of Azkaban. By the time I got through the first chapter, I already knew. I was going to write for kids. I started to recall all the wonderful fantasy stories I had loved as a kid, but had left behind when I became Serious about Art. But once I rediscovered children's books, and middle grade in particular, I suddenly had All The Ideas. I had characters and plots and settings and adventures, and I went home, got a job at a Barnes & Noble, and started trying to write a novel.

And yes, that was quite a few years ago. There was a bit of a learning curve!

How about you? Did you always know what you wanted to write? Did you find your niche? Or are you still looking?