Wherefore Art Thou Query Letter

Lately I've been doing the extra legwork of finding an agent.  It's hard to get started too early on this end of fiction writing (this being the marketing end, the end I hate) because there's a lot of work to be done.  Ultimately, this is the first gateway to a world of success and possibility.  Your first sell as a novelist is usually your hardest one.  You have to get out there and say, "Hey! Jaded-ass-editor person who reads pile after pile of shitty manuscripts on a daily basis.  Yeah, it's me down here, Chumbo NewAuthor.  I think you'd really like my book."

Lately, I've been putting together a list of agents that I'm going to send queries to.  The last thing you want to do here is shotgun a bunch of manuscripts at agents that you find on a database.  Everyone hates that.  Instead, they like you to do a little research and find out what books they've represented in the past.  Then send them that sort of book.  This one is much easier to do the other way around.  Confused?  Good.

You've written a book about an eccentric college professor who falls in love with an alien from another dimension who only communicates in cheeseburgers.  You call it Cheeseburger Out of This World of Love.  It's a masterpiece.  Here's how you get an agent for it: find another book that falls very closely into this same category.  Might be tricky with Cheeseburger Out of This World of Love but you manage it.  You find a book about an archeologist who falls in love with a magic dinosaur fossil that comes to life and wants to be a gourmet, Italian chef.  It's called Jurassic Meatball of Love.  Now that you've got this book, which is pretty similar to yours (and that isn't a bad thing in this industry) you open it to the acknowledgements.  Sure enough this author, Dutchess Esmerelda De Allistair, has credited her agent in the front, one Chumbo McWeatherbottom.  You Google Chumbo and find his agency along with his contact information.  Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

Finding more books like yours and the agents who represented them isn't that hard.  It just takes a little extra work and the agents you query will usually really appreciate it.  The tricky part, at least for me, is writing a query letter.  This is my next labor that I must meditate on.

Cyber Detective Series Is No More

Bad news for Bad for Business fans--all two of you.  The time has almost come for me to start a new project.  Well, that's not exactly true, but the time has come for me to THINK about starting a new project.  While I considered writing the next book in the Cyber Detective series that I self published on Smashwords and Amazon, this is proving to not be a productive use of my time.

I think I actually lost money on that novella.  Let's work it out.  I spent just about $5 each time I went to Office Supply for printing, which was about three times.  Okay.  I spent about $15 dollars just on paper copies for my writer's group and I made about $10 in royalties.  Yup, I'm in the hole by five bucks.  Awesome.

I don't have much time to spend on writing and I feel that, ultimately, my Urban Fantasy hero, Jason Ingram (had to change his name) will actually make me money.  Sure, I could write another story about Adrien, and maybe someday I will, but at this point, it's just not worth it to me to write another book that no one will read.  Sorry.

Cyberpunk just isn't a big genre.  Remember Johnny Mnemonic?  Yeah, who does?  With the exception of the classics (Snow Crash, Neuromancer, Blade Runner) people just aren't that into this genre.  That's okay.  The one person who left me a review on Smashwords said that he was into it until he figured out that it was Sci Fi.  If I'd written a regular detective story about a regular dude, I probably would have had a lot more success and that's what I want.  Sad to admit but true.

Monday, Monday, Bloody Monday

You ever get out of bed in the morning and realize you've just made a horrible error?  Now you have to be awake and do things.  Get dressed.  Brush your teeth.  If you don't, no one else will.  That is a Monday.  They suck balls.

You trudge through your day and count down the minutes to your lunch break and then, eventually, to your final minutes of work.  You count down the minutes in your car until you get home.  You have a snack.  You count down the minutes until that's over.  If you're me, you also have a cup of tea and reluctantly turn on your computer.  Editing is the last thing you want to do.  In your head, it sounds like mining iron ore on Mars without a spacesuit.  You blood boils and freezes at the same time on the surface of Mars.  You think about how cool that science is as you choke and reach your hand at nothing and die.  Cool cool science.  All in your head.

Finally, you groan and come back to life.  Computer's still waiting for you.  It's weird, double-visored cyclops-like face staring at you and mocking.

See?  It's got a face.

Come on guy.  Don't you want to be a writer?  Do this stuff for a living?  Fun fun fun.  You peel yourself off the floor and do your damn job.

It's a little dramatic, but that's how I feel.  Editing is the absolute last thing I want to do right now.  I'm actually looking out my window and seriously considering mowing the lawn.  My old nemesis.  But I'm editing anyway.

Rewrites Are A Pain In The Ass

Just like the title says.

I remember blogging about how much I hated the editing stage when I was working on Bad For Business last year.  What I didn't know was that a much larger work, my new full-length novel in particular, would be a much bigger pain in the ass.  I guess what I hate about it is that, for the most part, the creativity is over at this stage.  Now it just needs to look as nice as it can and be a good face for me and my work.

I also hate that aspect too.  The shoe-shining, hair-slicking, put-on-your-best-suit angle.  I feel that people who genuinely like the story won't stop reading because of a typo or a cluttered image.  The people that I'm really concerned with at this stage are the more flighty readers.  The people who put down a book because they thought the horse's name aught to be Tom instead of Fred.  And yet, I'd really like these people to stick around and read the whole thing.  I want as many readers as I can get, that's the marketing angle of it.

I know that some readers will ultimately drop off at some point in the story.  It's okay.  Reading is a hobby, not a job.  You don't always finish every book you pick up, but I've spent so much work on this one that I hope someone does finish it.

Addled Brain, Muttled Ideas

Sometimes I wish writing was just about the ideas.  Those nuggets that you get in your head and make you think, "Hey, that would be a cool story." I feel that happens for me a lot these day.  Like to the point that if I write at my current pace (which is about a novel a year) I'll have work until I'm 124 years old.

Getting to that point, my only goal for my next novel is that I write it faster.  That's it.  No fancy language or character goals.  Just faster.  Although, most publishers think you should write about a novel every two years, but some authors produce as much as two novels within a year.  Different series of course.  Much more than that, and they expect you to use a pen name.  You know, Isaac Asimov wrote or edited something like 500 hundred novels in his lifetime.  It's pretty crazy.

This was going somewhere...started as a rant but it got away from me.

Novel Finished, Still Work To Do

I've been delaying this post for several weeks now in case of fire or flood or aliens or zombies or...apocalypse stuff.  I finished my new novel, the one that I'm tentatively calling Lost Lamb.  Title still isn't finalized.  Anyway, I guess I was expecting more to happen when I finished it.  I mean, not like confetti and sexy parties or anything just, I don't know, a more powerful sense of accomplishment.  I was happy that it got done, it was a personal milestone, but I guess I already knew then that there was still a lot of work to do on it.

Now there's editing and rewriting, which is turning out to be really challenging because my style shifted a lot during the writing process.  Now I'm trying to go back through and make it all sound like me.  Whoever that is.  Maybe the really exciting part will come once I get an agent and then a publisher.  That just might make my ego inflate to the point that it explodes.  In the meantime, I'm still trying to write some shorter works when I can.  One such work, The Admin Level is one that I'm actually considering sending off to a big-boy magazine.  The kind that .10 cents a word.  Much nicer than it sounds.

So, after a long day of wrangling kids at work, here I go to more work.  Edit.  Edit.  Edit.