Query resources

fuckyeahstoryswap:

Seriously. Visit these pages if you are seriously considering submitting to a query agent or publishing house.

EVEN if you aren’t, it will certainly help you put your novel in perspective! Nothing exposes plot bunnies like a query or synopsis.

1. THE SHARK

2. Query Quagmire

3. Confessions

4. Query Flowchart

also Writer Beware

(Source: )

emilybooks:

We are so proud and excited to announce that in February, Emily Books will make Meghan Daum’s My Misspent Youth available for the first time as an ebook. These essays — about debt, about leaving New York, about online dating, about adulthood, about carpet — are some of our favorites of all time. And soon, you’ll be able to read them on your phone (iPad, Kindle, Kobo, Nook, etc).

We usually keep our picks secret until they’re in subscribers’ mailboxes, but this time we’re announcing early to give you time to mark your calendars for Emily Books’s first L.A. event!  

On February 20th, join Emily and Meghan at M Bar, where Emily will ask Meghan questions and then Meghan will read and then you’ll ask Meghan questions and then we’ll all drink. Also please be nice to Emily, this is only her 2nd visit to L.A. of her lifetime.

RSVP HERE!  (login via FB or create a profile)

"I don’t know how much useful advice I have for my students, but I do feel evangelical when explaining that their first duty as novelists is to love their creations—their characters—wholeheartedly. And that their second duty is to ignore the protectiveness that love naturally engenders—the urge to shelter their characters from harm—and instead subject them to serial catastrophes. Expose their flaws mercilessly, publicly. Hold them up to ridicule. Contrive fiendishly cruel and resourceful ways to mortify them. By doing so, you’re doing them a favor. For memorable fiction—the only kind worth attempting—typically makes a passage through, and at best only partially triumphs over, the world’s all too numerous excruciations."

Brad Leithauser, “Reading Your Friends’ Novels,” The New Yorker’s Page Turner blog

(Source: newyorker.com)

“[David] Wojnarowicz rose to fame in the 1980s, a gay activist whose work exposed the blatant homophobia in organized religion and other institutions. 7 Miles a Second, in comic book form, tells the story of Wojnarowicz’s life in three parts: as a child prostitute turning tricks near Times Square, as a homeless teenager scraping by on the streets of New York City, and as an adult with AIDS, clinging to life. Romberger and Wojnarowicz began work on it around 1986, but Wojnarowicz died from AIDS-related complications before they could complete the book together.”

Read the rest of my article on Publishers Weekly.

"There is something about the publication of a book that feels to me like going to the airport and being manhandled by security and then heading down the long cold lonely ramp until, at last, the book is poured into InDesign or whatever they use now."

Choire Sicha, “How Should an Author Be?”

(Source: The Awl)

View high resolution

bookriot:

Don’t know what this string of numbers means? Find out in The Beginner’s Guide to Identifying First Editions

(via lettersfromafutureeditor)

"The thing about writers is that, with very few exceptions, they grow slowly—very slowly. A John Updike comes along, he’s an anomaly. That’s no model, that’s a phenomenon. I sent stuff to The New Yorker when I was in college and then for ten years thereafter before they accepted something. I used to paper my wall with their rejection slips. And they were not making a mistake. Writers develop slowly. That’s what I want to say to you: don’t look at my career through the wrong end of a telescope. This is terribly important to me as a teacher of writers, of kids who want to write."

Author John McPhee

(Source: theparisreview.org)

Edwidge Danticat talks editing:

I would rather cut than add so I overwrite to cut. I am sometimes tempted to cut everything. I cut all the appendages, things that don’t seem to belong, things that lead nowhere, extra words. I have a weakness for the word ‘that’ from the French ‘que’ so I search for that and cut it as well as adverbs, and also from the French, instances where I have characters begin to do something rather than just do it. The hardest material to cut is the stuff you spent the most time on.

Today in book news: PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE.

New York Daily News: "One Direction fan fiction gets book deal" →

Dreams come true — and fast — for One Direction fans of literary inclinations. A 16-year-old who was just a short time ago writing fan fiction on movellas.com just landed herself a publishing deal from Penguin.

Emily Baker’s work was the site’s biggest hit and received over 30,000 requests for more. Penguin senior fiction editor Lindsey Heaven saw the story and snapped it up immediately for the publishing house. And that, folks, is how the publishing industry works in 2012.

(Source: maythebroads)