The Megaphone Society
Oh yeah, I am the featured Author of the Month for June by The Megaphone Society. Yay me!
It seems like composing and editing a query to send to agents is as much work as writing the book itself. Like the book, you want the query to be perfect in every way, but the hard part of the query is that you have to boil down, to a matter of one or two pages, the essence of a novel that is (in this case) 77,000 words. What to put in, what to leave out? How to adequately describe a 300 page novel in a few paragraphs?
Time to get back to work. I hope to start sending out my query in a week or so. Wish me luck and success.
I'll leave you with a brief excerpt from the book:
“Mom?”
Her lips quivered. “Randy took
off. You'll stay home from school today. I'll tell them you have
fever.”
Jamie looked into her eyes. She
looked back. They wanted to talk about what happened, but they never
did. It was too awful to verbalize. They wanted to talk about the
possibility that maybe Randy wouldn't come back this time, but they
didn't. They knew he would return – he always did. But there are
some things a mother and son can communicate without speaking, and so
they conversed wordlessly for a few moments.
She let him know how sorry she
was for what happened. How she wanted to do something but she was
afraid.
He let her know it was okay. It
wasn't her fault.
She promised things would
change. She'd get a job. They'd move. She'd find a nice man.
He indicated he believed her.
Then he turned his head and hid from her eyes the fact that he knew
those things would never happen. That things would never change. That
Randy would come back and abuse him again.
Once he'd flushed the skepticism
from his mind he turned back toward her and looked again into her
eyes.
She let him
know how much she loved him. He was the world to her. No matter how
bad their lives got, they always had each other.
After
she'd said
all she could, Crystal looked away. She wanted to go to the
police, but Randy had told her that if she ever did he would kill
them both. She didn't know if he was bluffing, but the threat, always
floating around in the back of her mind, popped up like a neon sign
whenever she considered calling the authorities.
If you can't wait for my book to be picked up by a publisher and pushed out to bookstores across the country, you can find my other books here:
Hey Daniel, I saw you over on The Megaphone Society. How has the query process gone? How has self-publishing and blogging been working for you?
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteRhett,
ReplyDeleteThanks for corresponding. The query process has been slow. I've only heard from one agent and it was a polite "not what we're looking for" reply. I have many others out and plan to keep pushing forward.
As far as self-publishing goes, I have self-pubbed 5 books (two nonfiction books, two fiction novels, and one fiction novella). I have had modest success, and gotten a lot of good feedback on those books. Self-publishing these days is very easy and inexpensive to do. Anyone can do it. And it seems everyone is doing it, so it's hard to stand out. But it's a good thing, because anyone who wants to write a book can do it and get their work in print.
As you can see, I don't blog often because I spend most of my time writing and revising the books I am working on.
(I had to delete and repost my comment because it won't allow me to edit, only delete. Sorry)