When you check and your name isn't on the list

Right, so there you are. You entered a contest, and now, the world has moved on and you didn’t get to the coveted agent round.

I feel for you.

I feel for you because I’ve been in your shoes. And what makes it harder is that sometimes those people go on to getting agents, and you feel like that could have been you.

It’s hard to be objective at this moment in life because you just received a blow. When you get cut from something, it feels like you were attacked. It feels like someone took your dream out of your heart and used it to park a tractor on. When I was rejected, I’d always feel like the world had just spit me out and keep on going.

I felt worthless.

I felt like a crappy writer regardless of what anyone else said.

I hated feeling so disregarded, because I felt like I was ready. I was ready for the big leagues. This is what I’d tell myself. I’d watch those contests trying to feel supportive of my friends and CPs, but in truth, I often had a sick green monster on my shoulder.

I know there is nothing I can tell you that will make it better, but I’m a writer and by default, I believe the impossible is merely difficult.

Publishing, the business side of writing, makes no logical sense. It just doesn’t. So when you get a rejection and you can’t figure out why a manuscript you feel is inferior gets the big agent and a contract in three days, it’s not what you think. Sometimes people win the lottery, but you don’t see them doubting their self worth when they don’t win the jackpot.

But with writing we do. It’s bizarre, but it’s part of writing. And maybe, just maybe, there is something that could be made more perfect about your manuscript. Or maybe your writing is Ah-May-Zing, but your story is a portal with a pretty typical other world. No matter how much I love those, no one is buying them in publishing, and that trickles down the castle walls.

Chin up. Write more. One thing about publishing: when you do get your break, the first thing they are going to ask you is “What else do you have?” Be sure you have something else, so get back to writing, even if your heart is feeling a bit broken.

The Wait Game, or LEARN from my FAIL

I’m sure many of you unagented writer types are like me right now: biting my nails hoping to get into a couple of contests.  Turns out I’ve done this contest thing once or twice, and I have some advice for you if you make it to the agent round.  It’s really simple advice:

WAIT.

After you get a request from an agent, wait. I know this sounds really simple, but trust me, wait a day. Read through your submission, and then hit send.

But Rena, aren’t the agents all hot to trot? They just requested material!!!! I might die if I wait another second!!!!

Oh hyperactive me from the past*, I know how that feels, but let me just say, you will hate yourself tomorrow morning if you hit send tonight.  Shoot, you might hate yourself in thirty seconds if you hit send right now.

Story time:

There I was twitter pitching my little heart out when LO AND BEHOLD an agent favorited my pitch. I almost died. I jumped up and down like a fool, I did the happy dance. I ran a quick research run on the agent. It was someone I wanted to query (reps a couple of super awesome writers I love), and I was over the moon.  The agent wanted to see my work. MINE! I mean how could that even be possible. I could almost see myself floating up out of the slush pile masses to join the luminaries of the writing community: agented writers.

In the thirty minutes of research, my heart thumped and thumped in my chest. My adrenaline made my fingers shake, but I felt like I was taking too long to ship off the requested material. I read faster, I went to the agency website and read up on all of the agents and who they repped and what kind of agency they were. And then I hit send.

Only to realize that there were two agents with names that started with the same letter and I’d just sent it to the WRONG ONE!!!!

AND THEN! Like a complete idiot who has taken a vacation from what little senses I might have had, I tweeted to the agent.

That’s right, I was so nervous I tweeted to the WORLD how I’d screwed up submitting the requested materials and addressed it all to the wrong agent.

It’s unlikely that this really killed my submission (it just wasn’t quite ready, close but no cigar), but it sure didn’t help. I’d kick myself more, but like I said, the project wasn’t quite ready. I tried not to feel like such a fool for the rest of the month, but every time it came up, I just wanted to crawl into a hole.

My point is that if you get a request, sit on it overnight if at all possible. It was such a simple mistake, and I could have avoided it by not jumping the gun. Learn from my fail. Patience. Wait. Think about contests a little bit more like when you get a guy or girl’s number. You don’t call them the morning after the party, you wait (until at least noon).

Good luck out there, and I mean it, wait. You can do it. You’ve already waited a week or more to find out if you made the agent round, what’s another day?

*This is totally paying homage to CrashCourse History because John Green is awesome. 

October is for contests!

My rewrite of Query Bait: A Novel is nearing completion. It’s not an easy thing, but I can definitely see the light at the end of the tunnel. And as if to celebrate the nearly ready to go back to the trenches, all the blogs are holding contests!

Nightmare on Query Street hosted by Michelle, Mike, and SC

Trick or Treat With Agents hosted by Brenda Drake

And an as yet untitled contest from Writerly Rejects.

Also, there’s Miss Snark’s First Victim’s Baker’s Dozen which starts kicking off with Logline critiques coming up on the 30^th (there are three rounds, so don’t worry, there’s plenty of time).

So, am I the only person in love with contests? I think it must be a sickness. Statistically speaking most people don’t get picked up from a contest, but I love the feedback and meeting all the other writers. Now back to rewriting and polishing so Query Bait can go back out into the world.

Falling behind

Eeek, this is a pretty big week. I'm not going to list all of the mundane reasons for that here, but one of the somewhat less mundane reasons is that I'm in Query Kombat. It's the first round, so if you feel like a lark, you can go here and read the my entry (I'm Dr. Thermo). It's a head to head style contest (or is it Kontest), so one of us is going home. It's a brutal format because the judges literally have to pick one over the other, and that can't be easy. Anyone can comment, but no cheerleading is allowed in the early rounds (here's a post on how to comment in the Kontest). And I'm now completely off topic.

My point for this entry is that I've fallen behind on some big things. Big, BIG things, so I need to take a break from blogging. Every time I take a break, I've noticed that I really don't take much of a break, but I'm noticing that this is  a simple impossibility over the next few weeks. So for a couple weeks (hopefully two), I'm going on a blogger diet. I won't be commenting as much (but you can bet I'm still reading, cause I'm like that), and I certainly won't be posting as often. On the plus side, in a few weeks, I should be caught up enough to reveal new stuff on the ol'blog.... Right, who am I kidding. If I'm lucky, I'll be knee deep in Act III by the time I come back, and that never lends itself to pursuits other than Act III.






p.s. Me taking a break does not interrupt my insecure writer's post!

So, you want to enter a contest

It’s no surprise that I’m a complete contest junkie. I think I love them because they have that feel of promise. There’s a deadline and everything. Unlike querying, you know EXACTLY when you’ll hear back. It’s very tempting.

But here’s the deal, contests are not a short cut to the front of the query line. You know how you get an agent through a contest? The same way you get an agent through a query letter. You ready for this?

The formula is really simple to say, but really, REALLY hard to do.

You write a spectacular book.

That’s it.

Spectacular. Excellent. Knock my socks off and send me to the moon in my need to join your fan-club good. You want a book that is exceptionally good.

Not okay, or good, but a book that makes people's knees weak with the need to read it. The terrible truth is that there are thousands of good unpublished books out there. Thousands. Probably tens of thousands, if you consider all the books that were trunked, or made it to the acquisition committee but never translated into the big times.

Your book has to be better than all of those.

“But Rena, my book is awesome sauce on toast, and I still can’t get any query love.”

Man, I hear you there. I’m not going to lie. This is a really hard business. Your book has to be awesome. It has to seem like something the agent can sell. And it must be written well. Like better than great. As in you’ve sent it through twenty sets of eyes, and all of them came up with “This is awesome, the only problem I saw was on page 237 where you had two spaces after a period.” This might be a touch of an exaggeration, but remember that you make your book its absolute best before you query or enter a contest.

I know this is daunting, but it’s the book that matters. You can write the world’s greatest pitch, and get a full request from every agent in a contest, but that’s not going to translate into representation if your book isn’t awesome.

I hated this advice when I first started querying, but it’s absolutely true. Requests are not representation. There are no gimmicks. Your book must be spectacular.

Now, having said that, it doesn’t hurt to have a really stellar pitch and a spectacular query letter.

In the end though, it’s the book that will get you the attention you’re hoping for.

I know I hated this advice when I was getting started, but I came around to it in the end (got enough partial rejections to “get it” I guess). So I’m curious what advice did you hate getting that turned out to be completely true and eventually useful?

On Contests, disenfranchised writers, and commercial success

 

I don’t know if any of you witnessed the dust up over at Cupid’s Literary Connection on Friday, but it’s had me thinking about contests and writers all weekend long.

Some background: Cupid got trolled. She responded in a very professional manner. Unfortunately, the attacks were pretty personal, so she had to delete the most offensive comment. It’s really too bad, I sort of like giving people enough rope to hang themselves, but I can see where Cupid was coming from. Good on her for responding with the calm of a steely-eyed missile man (that’s a nerdy NASA compliment).

More background: It was a guest post by Dahlia about who should enter contests and why. Zang! She was spot on, and I have to sheepishly admit that I have violated her “If your novel isn’t ready, don’t submit it to a contest. You are just wasting our time.” (Hangs head in shame and considers littering up inboxes with apologies and thank you notes).

What was controversial about Dahlia’s statements was something I thought everyone knew: If your manuscript has been making the contest rounds, consider not entering every single contest. She rightly stated that many, many contests have all the same agent judges. They like contests; that’s how they play. Simple as that. Which means that if you get your stuff in front of the same agent more than once, they can see how your submission is (or is *not* changing), but pretty much, if they’ve seen it twice and passed both times, they really aren’t interested. Dahlia suggested that if you’d already put your manuscript out that you be considerate and not stick it out there again and again and again. She suggested that such a write might want to give someone else a chance to get their work in front of agents.

I totally understand why some people were upset about that idea. But she’s pretty much spot on.

So why would writers keep throwing out their trodden down manuscripts over and over so much that she would suggest that some people with tired manuscripts leave off for a while? As writers, we sometimes start to feel desperate about our work. “Will I ever get published?” “Why won’t an agent just read my manuscript?” “Why is this taking so long?” “Holy Krakatoa, am I going to have to trunk another novel and start this business over from scratch?????” “Please dear god of literary awesomeness, let THIS novel be the one. Pretty please.”

It’s easy for these thoughts to become the blackened vitriol of the disenfranchised. Perhaps you’ve heard a few:

“Agents never sign clients from the slush.”

“Agents never read query letters unless they already know you.”

“Agents are only interested in commercial drivel.”

“Agents are three horned devils who only wear Prada and Jimmy Choos.”

Okay, maybe that last one is on to something, but I can honestly say that the whole idea of the first three statements are utterly negated by a shred of logic.

Statement one “Agents never sign clients from the slush.”

This one is so laughable, I don’t even think it’s worth mentioning that the number of clients signed by a contest versus those who get signed from the slush? It’s not even a contest (see what I did there), it’s something ridiculous like 95% of clients signed come from the slush.

Statement two “Agents never read query letters unless they already know you.”

Then what is the point of being open to queries? I mean really, if they’re so busy that they only read queries from people they know, they have a mode for that. It’s called the “I’m closed to queries except for by referral.” Yeah, I know, it’s crazy the information you can find out about an agent by doing some research!

Statement three “Agents are only interested in commercial drivel.”

Sigh, internet, you make me so sad some days. Yes, agents want something commercial, and I understand if there are really popular books that have both massive fan followings and massive detractors (cough coughtwilightcough cough), but to insinuate that all commercial successes are drivel shows an incredible closed mindedness that should be educated by watching Phineas and Ferb Across the Second Dimension. No really, it’s a great movie, a commercial success, and aimed at children so the content isn’t too mentally challenging.

It’s also brilliant in a super nerdy way.

And there are lots of nerds in the world.

There are also a ton of screaming teenage girls in the world. That doesn’t mean that every boy band is untalented and incapable of singing a real song. It just doesn’t hurt their music that they’re cute and overproduced. Same with books.

My point is just because it’s commercial doesn’t mean it lacks emotional value.

As writers, when we fall into those desperate places, and those disenfranchised thoughts start to turn our heads inside out, it’s time to take a break. See the world not from your own corner, but take a look around you. I get that life isn’t the basket of roses Annie promised, but that doesn’t make it a pit of depravity either. Writing is very insular, and sometimes we need a moment or two away from the publishing scene to really create something that will knock the judges off their podiums.

Take a break. Recharge. Write what you love. And for the love of chocolate, don’t take your frustrations out on anyone, especially not the contest providers. Now, go watch The Kid President if you’re having a hard time, and get back to writing (it’s the only part that matters until you sign or decide to self publish).

Now, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m going to go offer my services to some of these bloggers who are always hosting the contests I LOVE entering. What they do is above and beyond, and I’m in awe of their paying back (or forward or sideways).

p.s. I didn't talk about people charging for contests, but that's because I don't have a deep meaningful answer for that. If you feel entering a contest is worth paying the paltry fee, then do it. If you don't, then don't enter, simple as that.