Well, talk about one and done. If you read my prior post you understand I am chartering my progress from a retired housewife to published author. My plan was to enter a fiction contest and take it from there.

Rule #5 get hungry. I have the book written, proofed and polished. I have my synopsis done, a query letter finished. I read the requirements over again and they need pages numbered. Huh? After all this they need the frigging pages numbered. Since i was under a deadline i hired my more computer savvy daughter do it. Once done I went back to register and the contest was full and not accepting any more manuscripts. It opened on Saturday and was full by Monday morning.

I expressed my dismay (Wah!) to my daughter and she laughed and said welcome to the dog eat dog world of publishing. It seems there are a lot of unknown, unsigned, unnoticed, passed over authors of the Next Great American Novel out there. Lesson ‘get hungry’ means get ahead of the game by being ready at the get go. In step one I mentioned formatting. This is why it’s important. I wasn’t ready. I had the book already done, but i didn’t number the pages. The two days it took me to get it done and I missed out on this opportunity.

I guess you need a thick skin and a healthy ego to be a writer. I’m older. I was in medical sales and needed both to succeed, they can’t scare me. Having a rude doctors was the norm, plus i have four brothers, one who tormented me terribly, so like I said, ‘you can’t scare me.’ I am continuing the process by submitting a Query letters to book agents I find online. It’s a one-off process. Instead of having my book in front of a panel of judges, I need to send a ‘pitch’ letter, otherwise know as a Query letter. That’s 250-300 words to convince a book agent to take a closer look at what you’d like to present, your manuscript. Sell it baby. My goal is to go through this list of a thousand agents, read their bios and see if querying them is a good idea. What this means is if they work nonfiction or cookbooks, you might not want to waste your time or theirs with your pitch. I suppose if you pitch the wrong person but they are so impressed with you they pass it along to an agent who can rep you, great. Really great. Good luck like that never blesses me, I’m going to grind it out myself. Stay and watch me wall paper my bathroom with rejection letters. Until next time, welcome to the great unknown.