Monday, June 04, 2007

Writing life

When I first began the writing journey I was filled with optimism and some caution. After all, if it were easy to become a best selling author then surely there would be a lot more variety of names on the New York Times best seller list. And I wondered why genre fiction titles were never listed. Mickey Spillane and Zane Grey never had best sellers? But every industry has its mysteries. I ignored the imponderables and pressed ahead writing a great romance.

The story was crammed with details and characters and a gripping plot, it had everything I wanted in a love story. My first serious doubts all revolved around how to attract the notice of a publisher. Since I was aware that thousands of women submitted novels each year, the burning question became how to stand out from the crowd. A query letter and synopsis were the tools used to hook an editor's interest and I set about crafting a set of irresistible sales implements.

To my amazement, a compelling query letter and synopsis proved to be much easier to conquer than the story. The QLS package got good results. More than half of those sent resulted in a request for either a full or a partial manuscript. Alas, the story so lovingly crafted did not find the same welcome acceptance. The second communications from the publishers invariably ran along the lines of: not right for us . . . best of luck . . . yours truly . . . editorial department.

I concluded that the lovely editor who'd signed the first request for the manuscript must have left the country for an extended trip, or been reassigned to another department, or left on maternity leave, or. . . It wasn't until I'd received this same response a couple of times that I considered the story wasn't as engaging to editors as it was to me.

to be continued. . .

2 Comments:

Blogger Lori Borrill said...

Uh! You're leaving me hanging???

Okay, I'll be back when you are. ;-)

4:25 PM  
Blogger Evanne Lorraine said...

LOL - I'll continue the journey soon - compulsively fixing invisible errors at the moment.

9:15 AM  

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