Tag: Publishing

A Painless Rejection Letter–Does Such A Thing Exist?

ByRachel August 29, 2009 0 Comments
Yes, you heard it here first, folks. I got a rejection letter (er, e-mail) that actually wasn't painful. Here's why. One year ago this summer, I sent a proposal of my then-unfinished novel FLYNN to a publishing house. I had connections through a writer's conference, and expected to hear back promptly. Nothing happened for months. Over time, I came to assume that they didn't want the thing, so I...

Publishing Short Stories

ByRachel August 26, 2009 2 Comments
We novel writers feel the temptation to put all our publishing eggs in one basket. Because novels are so time-consuming to produce, we spend most of our writing time on that and little (if any) on short stories or articles. Trouble is, short stories and articles have a greater chance of getting published, thus creating that valuable list of publishing credits that agents and editors like to see...

Query Letter Guidelines

ByRachel July 28, 2009 2 Comments
What does a good query letter look like? Well, that depends on who you ask. Frustrating as it is, different sources will give you different query letter guidelines. I know this because I'm in the process of querying for FLYNN, and have read two books and several web sites on the subject. Here are the guidelines which seem to be consistent. A query should: give a concise description of the...

Book Marketing for the Adventurous Soul: Tip #1 Planting the Seeds of Book Signings

ByRachel July 14, 2009 3 Comments
As I launch into this adventure of (hopefully) publishing, the subjects of book marketing and author promotion are ever in my mind. It's a fact that authors must self-promote books, and that's hard in a world over-saturated with media promotions and advertisements. The savvy author gets creative, and that's what I intend to do with these highly experimental and as-yet-untested ideas. Will they...

A short despair, if you'll indulge me

ByRachel July 10, 2009 1 Comment
If you've time, perhaps you'd like to hear about my moment of despair. Right now I'm unemployed and have no guarantee that anyone in the publishing world is ever going to print what I've just spent the last 13 months of my life working on every weekday. I may not have anything to show for this endeavor, except to be even further behind those of my peers who are already showing promising careers....