Um . . . am I back?

Hmmm.

Gotta admit, I never really expected to be back here. In fact it's been so long, I couldn't even remember the email address for this blog, much less the password.

But something strange happened.

Comments kept coming in, for which I'm very grateful and even touched. I started this blog originally as a way to help sort out points in my own head as I was revising my novel. As such, it was really more of a log or diary for myself, than an attempt to reach an audience. I was really trying to teach myself, not others. I'm thrilled that so many people have found my meandering missives to be of some value. So, thank you.

Because of your continued interest, I thought I'd give you some updates.

1) Since I started this blog, the publishing industry has been turned upside down, both for the good and the bad. With the introduction of e-readers, print publishers have ducked their head deep into the sand, terrified to sign new writers unless they are reasonably guaranteed a blockbuster. Big name. Big topic. Whatever. The days of the small novelist getting signed are gone. At least for a while, until the industry sorts itself out.

The flip side of this, is that its never been easier to self-publish, and with e-readers, you're guaranteed instantaneous distribution around the world.

This same series of events has happened to the music industry, where the major labels are losing money every day, but small bands can get their music released easier now than ever before.

The problem is getting attention to your book. But let's be honest, big publishers didn't really spend much effort in publicisizing new authors anyway. As I found out when our health book was published, we still had to hire a publicist and hit the pavement on our own.

2) As a corollary to #1, the novel never got published. I had an agent pick it up and start shopping, then drop out of contact. This was a "major" publisher at an established New York Agency. A name I'd heard for years. Turns out the younger agent at this house quit the business. The novel got pushed over from one agent to another but the enthusiasm was lost. Eventually, it just languished a painful, lonely existence.

3) As another corollary to #3, I'm going to self-publish the novel. I've been researching my options and I'd like to e-publish, but also with about 500 physical copies that I can sell at my office.

4) In the meantime, I've been very busy. The music writing site, The Ripple Effect, has really taken off, and now has 14 writers and millions of readers. One thing led to another, and my Ripple partner and I started a record label, Ripple Music, to release hard-driving, authentic 70's-infused rock music. It's been an amazing journey and a real kick in the tush.

Now a question for you:

I don't know if there are any readers out there who pop over here from time to time, but if there are, would you like me to write about my experiences with self-publishing?

I figure the self-publishing journey will be just as full of ups and downs and rights and wrongs and successes and mistakes as the original journey was. I'm happy to share these as I go through them, if you'd like me to.

Just let me know.

In the meantime . . . peace.

20 Tips on Query Letters

This is another great post that came across the Guide to Literary Agents blog. Since we were talking about queries, I thought I'd share it.


Agent Janet Reid of FinePrint Literary Management gave an intensive workshop on queries at the South Carolina Writers Workshop. Here are 20 tips to writing an effective query, according to the Query Shark herself.


FOR STARTERS

• Be professional. It’s a business letter—not a personal letter.

1. Regarding salutation and tone, err on the side of caution because formality is never out of place.
2. “Dear Agent” or “To Whom It May Concern,” however, is too impersonal.
3. Pet peeve: If you’re querying an agent’s direct e-mail (i.e. “janet@” and you address the query “Dear Agent,” you don’t come across as being too smart.

• Be comfortable with computers. Publishing is moving toward the electronic age, so move with it.

1. Have an e-mail address with your name in it (e.g., SuziWriter@gmail.com). This shows her you are professional. How is she to take you seriously if your e-mail is cutiepiehoneyface@aol.com?
2. Have your own e-mail account—not one you share with a spouse.
3. Have a Gmail or Earthlink account. She says AOL is bad for queries because its spam filters sometimes eat e-mails without your knowledge, and you could be missing a reply.
4. Also, add the agents to your “safe senders” lists to ensure you receive their replies.

• Use a referral. Agents always move referrals to the top of the stack if someone they know vouches for the writer.

1. Do not, however, quote your rejection letters, friends, critique partners, paid editors, or conference critiques. These comments are not the same as referrals.

THE NITTY GRITTY

1. Don’t start with a rhetorical question. You’re talking to really sardonic people in New York City, and they’re not going to answer the question how you expect.
2. Get right to the main character—by name.
3. Tell who he/she is, and do it in as few words as possible.
4. Tell what happens to him or her—the initial point of conflict in the book.
5. Show two choices the main character faces as well as the consequences of those choices. The stakes must be high.

SUREFIRE QUERY KILLERS

1. “Fiction novel.” A novel is fiction, so when someone writes “fiction novel,” not only is it redundant, it makes the writer sound ignorant.
2. “Surefire bestseller.” Let the agent be the one to decide that. Declaring your work to be the next best thing shows you know little about the industry—and that you’re probably too arrogant for the agent to want to work with you.
3. “Film potential.” Janet says, “First of all, you don’t know shit.” (See arrogance comment above) Also, she’s not a film agent. She just wants to know what the book is about.

KEEP IT OUT

1. Inspiration. You only have 250 words, so don’t waste them. Stick to showing her what the book is about because how you came up with the idea does not interest agents in the query. “It’s the equivalent of making sausages,” she says. “I do not want to see you do it.”
2. Personal information. It doesn’t matter to agents where you live or how many cats you have.
3. Sometimes work information is relevant to you being the only person able to write a particular book; however, sometimes the worst people to write certain types of books are those who actually do those occupations (e.g., cops hate cop shows, doctors criticize medical dramas). They know the reality of the job too deeply, and it doesn’t make for good fiction.

TAKEAWAY

1. A query letter is the foundation upon which your publishing career rests, so remember: You can query too soon; you cannot query too late.


Janet Reid's publishing background includes 15 years in book publicity with clients both famous and infamous. She specializes in compelling fiction, particularly crime fiction, and narrative non-fiction, and she keeps a blog about agenting as well as a query critique blog.

Shameless Self-Promotion - First Review of my Novel

I hope y'all don't mind, but I recently received the first professional, independent review of my album, Deadly Vision. The novel hasn't been published yet, but my editor sought out an independent editor to review the book prior to her accepting to represent it. Not only did this give her impetus to represent the novel but it also gave her a review to pass on to the publishers to help her sell it.

Now, of course, I was a bit psyched when this came in, so if you don't mind, I'd like to share it with you. Feel free to pass this on to any publishers you'd like. :)

Here's my first review! Please send your thoughts.

The reader has a front row seat as Severin leads you into the world of virtual reality medicine and a graphic journey into the life in ER trauma care. Add to that some very surprising twists, well developed and quirky characters and you have a first rate thriller.

Todd Severin's Deadly Vision is one of the best Techno-thrillers I have read. He may be the new and improved Michael Crichton. This fast paced novel smoothly combines the author's fluency in both the medical field and the science of computer technology to escort the reader into the expanding world of virtual reality. Add Machiavellian politics, corporate espionage and murder and you have a novel the reader doesn't want to put down. I was highly entertained.

As an editor, I would add that this manuscript is well written and will require a minimum amount of editing. I'm impressed. Thank you for the opportunity to review his work.

Cold Querying Still Works

After locking myself away, secluded from society like the pictured monk, cold querying the entire state of New York and half the Atlantic Seaboard to find an agent to represent my medical thriller, I wondered how much trouble other writers had cold querying agents.

Then, like a streak of light, this was an interesting post that came across on the PubRants blog, which I found from the Guide to Literary Agents blog.

Guest blogger Megan Crewe, writing on agent Kristin Nelson's site, explains how she polled 270 successful fiction authors and asked them if they broke in with a referral (a personal connection with someone in the business) or whether they cold queried an agent with success.

The results came back and 62% of the authors got their agent with just a cold query. Pretty amazing - but more than that: encouraging! As agent Dan Lazar once saying that "A good query trumps all else - every time."

Don't know how good my query was, but I did get several requests to read the novel or for partials before I settled on the Bob DiForio Agency.

Now keep your fingers crossed on that sale!

So take hope!

One of my favorite writing blogs

I only subscribe to two writing blogs, and this is one of them. As writers, we're all operating ont he borderline of desperate to get our books published. Desperate and gullible. That's where Writers Beware comes in. Constantly, there's a feed of information on scams, traps, gimmicks, and other unsavory stuff we don't want to get involved in.

Here's an example from their latest post. Check them out at http://accrispin.blogspot.com/


Here are eight words you never want to hear from a publisher that is considering your manuscript for publication:

"How many books are you planning to order?"

Many writers are aware that it's a major red flag when a publisher's contract includes a clause requiring authors to buy their own books, or to commit to some kind of sales guarantee. Since an outlay of cash is a condition of publication, this is vanity publishing--what we at Writer Beware call "back-end" vanity publishing, since you're buying into the end of the publication process (finished books) rather than the beginning (paying for the book to be produced).

Stealthier back-end vanity publishers rely on pressure and encouragement, rather than contract clauses, to get authors to purchase their own books. They may produce "author manuals" that extol self-purchases with promises of huge profits, or employ "publicists" whose sole job is convincing authors that buying their books for re-sale is essential to success, or offer frequent special deals and discounts (buy 50 books, get 10 free!) to make self-purchases as attractive as a sale on canned soup at the grocery store. Since inexperienced authors may not know a lot about how publishing is supposed to work, they can be easily ensnared by this kind of deception.

Still other publishers that focus on author self-purchases are well-intentioned amateur efforts run by people who have no professional publishing experience, little or no financing, and, often, no concrete business plan. Because of their lack of capitalization and marketing expertise, it's very tempting for such publishers to settle into a business model where they rely on their authors as their principal customer base and sales force. This creates a closed loop, in which published books are marketed mainly to the books' creators--all but eliminating the publisher’s risk, and even possibly, guaranteeing a small profit. It’s this kind of publisher that’s most likely to ask you the question with which I began this post, rather than surprising you with contractual purchase requirements or bombarding you with special offers post-publication--since its intentions are basically benign, and it's not consciously trying to deceive or screw you.

Intentions aside, the author is the loser in all three of these scenarios. A publisher that relies on its authors as a main or major source of income is considerably reducing--if not entirely removing--its incentive to market and distribute the books it publishes. Why should it bother trying to sell books to the public, when it can turn its authors into customers? Why should it expend money and effort on getting books into the hands of readers, when it can persuade writers to function as an unpaid sales force, buying their own books and then re-selling them?

In each case, the publisher is failing to do what publishers are supposed to do: get books out into the world. While it's certainly true that authors nowadays are expected to self-promote, the self-promotion an author can do and the marketing a publisher should do are two different things--and without your publisher's active marketing and distribution support (I'm not talking here about writing press releases or getting books listed on Amazon), you have very little platform on which to build your self-promotion efforts. You're likely to wind up in much the same position as if you'd self-published--except that you'll probably have a more restrictive contract, a less professional product, and, in the case of the more unscrupulous back-end vanities, a considerably smaller bank account.

So if a publisher asks you about your plans for buying your own book, be on your guard. Even if the publisher isn’t obviously a vanity, even if it assures you that it's only collecting preliminary data and declares that your answer will have no bearing on its decision, the mere fact that it's thinking about author self-purchases at this early stage of the game is reason enough to move on.

(This post, by the way, was inspired by a real example: Black Rose Writing, which recently moved from just asking about authors' purchase plans, to actually including a purchase requirement in its contract.)

Yes, go ahead and yell at me!

Ok, ok, I know, once again I've been MIA for a while. I apologize.

Believe me, I'm not giving up on the writing affair, and I'm actually really touched (and flattered) when I logged in today and saw how many followers there are of this blog. It made me feel really guilty that I've been so poor in updating recently.

My novel is currently making the rounds in New York, handled by my agent at the Bob DiForio Literary Agency. I've heard rumors of nibbles, maybe even a few deep sniffs, but so far no one has devoured the complete dish. Please keep your fingers crossed.

This blog will explode in activity once a publisher takes a bite, because I plan on updating you with every issue, stumbling block, hurdle I have to jump through towards publication in an effort to try and help you avoid those same problems.

Also, this blog will explode in activity once I get started on my next novel, another medical thriller, that I'm currently researching. My outlining process is a little unique and really fun for me, so I can't wait to share it with you.

So why the dearth of posting of late? Because I'm slightly schizophrenic in my activities. Some of you may know that I also run a music site, The Ripple Effect, with my partner, the Pope. Well, one thing has lead to another and another, so now, in addition to our radio show on Blogtalkradio, we've just started our own record company, Ripple Music. We're currently working with 4 bands to get some really nice colored vinyl releases ready and out to the world. With that, we also formed a music publishing company, Ripple Songs.

So between it all, I haven't yet found the time to write.

But things are moving along well. Once the company is up and running, all the legal done, I'll have some free time and get back to writing and updating.

Thanks again, so much, for your support. I'm really flattered and appreciative.

I promise, regular updates will start again soon.

Writing the Query Letter - Key Point #1

As promised, we're going to do a series of posts on writing the query letter, including examples of query's that worked. Eventually, I'll post my query as well and we can dissect it together.

To start with, there are tons of references on how to write a query, and I've read them all, but it never really seems to make it easier to write one. The problem is effectively summarizing the hook of your story, making it eye catching, without being overly flamboyant or non-professional. In fact, that word professional, is the key in writing your query. The agent wants to know that you are a serious writer, understand professional demands, and can adhere to them. We've all heard of the queries written on pink paper or with cursive font because the author wanted to "stand out." Unfortunately, those tricks will make the author stand out . . . in a bad way!

Key #1: Be professional at all times.

This excerpt comes from the Guide to Literary Agents Blog.


ON PROFESSIONALISM:

"The first thing to think about when you sit down to write a query letter is that, in a lot of ways, it’s similar to writing a cover letter for a job application. You’re addressing your letter to a person who’s never met you before, and who sorts through hundreds of such letters a day. This crucial first contact is your chance to demonstrate that you’re smart, professional, and interesting. The way to convey those traits is through the tone and content of your letter. The tone should be professional, specific and engaging—never general, overly familiar or abrasive. Make sure your letter is well written and grammatically correct. And make sure to include all of your contact information, including your mailing address, phone number and e-mail address.

"These suggestions may sound obvious, but you’d be surprised how many letters I get that leave out vital contact information, start out with 'Hi Mollie—' instead of 'Dear Ms. Glick:', or include unprofessional phrases such as, 'You’ll probably just throw this letter out like the other agents have.' Occasionally, I get a letter written in a lighter, more humorous tone, and that’s OK—as long as the letter reflects the kind of book the author is querying me about (i.e., a humorous nonfiction book or funny novel) and it still includes all the information I need to know. But if in doubt, stick with a professional tone, and include a one- or two-line quote from the book to give the agent a taste of its voice.

"Like a cover letter, your query letter should be no longer than a page. It should include your contact information, a salutation, a paragraph describing your book, and a paragraph explaining why you’re the perfect person to write that book. Lets take a closer look at each of these components."

- Excerpted from the article "Write a Killer Query Letter: How to Hook an Agent," by Mollie Glick, in the 2010 Guide to Literary Agents.

More coming as we examine this in depth. Having written several queries, some that worked, many that didn't, we'll look at my letters and examine for strengths and weaknesses.