So 2014 has been a very mixed bag. The end of the year decided to be lovely by giving me a finished draft, and then decided to kick me in the soft bits at the last minute. How? Waiting. I knew there would be a lot of waiting in the writing industry—waiting for feedback from readers, waiting for responses from agents, waiting for feedback from publishers… WAITING! I knew it was going to happen, but as chance would have it, it’s much more intolerable than I expected.
What I’ve done with my tremendous amounts of time:
- INTERNET STALKING! 😀
Fun for boys and girls! Social media has made it so much easier to stalk people these days. Who am I stalking, though? Agents of course.
Building a list of agents to query has been much more time consuming than I thought. In the grand scheme of things, that’s probably the best, too. It’s filled that quiet space created by the waiting. Having something to focus my time on has kept me from worry about my readers hating every word I’ve written. Call me paranoid, I guess.
When I first started looking for agents I was so lost. http://www.querytracker.net has been a great starting place for me. It has wonderful searching and listing options. It has graphs that show the agents acceptance ratings, word-count data, response time, and other useful stats. What it DOESN’T include, though, is a list of deals made by those agents. That’s where http://publishersmarketplace.com/ has come in handy. They keep listings of all the deals made by agents. Scooting between the two sites has helped me a lot. The only downside I’ve found is that “Young Adult” is still listed as an all-inclusive genre, so I’ve had to go back to each agent’s personal page to see what type of YA they represent. Time consuming, but definitely worth it.
- PODCASTING PLANS FOR 2015!
The Red Ink Tank – A Podcast featuring Anna Banks, Heather Rebel and Kaylyn Witt
My critique group has started making plans for a podcast. We figure that if we meet regularly anyway, we might as well record some of our conversations.
When I was getting started, writing the biggest hunger I had was for the company of other writers. Especially if you have no friends nearby who are writers, the need for people who understand your passion is intense. I remember scouring the internet for blogs, vlogs, podcasts—anything that I could get my hands on—that made me feel like I was part of the writing community. I love the idea that I’m now on the other side of this and can give someone else at least one small haven where they feel like they’re engaged with the industry.
On a side note, I have no idea how to make a podcast. Guess what I’m filling more of my time with! Learning how to do podcasting is a little intimidating, but knowing that I’ve done it all myself is going to feel great once we have a finished product.
Self-sufficiency aside, though, PLEASE HELP ME!! Really, I’m pretty clueless right now. If you or anyone you know does podcasting and has some golden advice, please post it in the comments below.
Also, let me know what you might like to hear on a podcast about writing, critiquing, querying and publication!
FOLLOW THE RED INK TANK CREW AT:
At Wit{t}'s End 