This was on my web site but should have been on my blog. It was written on April 22nd of 2009:
For the last few months, since I realized that I was really going to finish my novel and try to have it published, I have been scatter-brained at best. I tried to find a writers group in my area to help ground me and give me great advice, but the nearest one is over an hour away and meets at a time when I am unable to attend (can you see the pouting expression on my face?). To compensate for that lack of personal guidance, I have been flying all over the internet trying to find tidbits of information that would be helpful in any way. Having collected some advice (I don’t know yet if it is good advice or not, only time will tell) I thought I would share.
I guess it would have been good to start in the beginning, but that is not what I did, I started at the last step – finding lists of agents and seeing what they want. For that I found Agent Query. This is a great little web site where you can get a brief about an agent and a link to their site, very handy. Reading their requirements was also a little defeating. Some agents want query letters first without any chapters, some want two-page synopses while others will take up to ten page synopses, some agents really stress the pitch while others don’t even mention it – there are no hard set standards to impressing agents and, the most frustrating part, writing the book is only the beginning of the process. So then I started looking at the process of getting published and came across Ginny Wiehardt’s take on “How to get Published” on About.com Guide to Fiction Writingand Donald Maass’ The Career Novelist: A Literary Agent Offers Strategies for Success.
Along the way of trying to figure out the details of process, I came across How “Fancy” Should Your Manuscript Be? from DailyWritingTipsand three different pages about writing the sysopsis: Writing a Novel Synopsis from Fiction Writer’s Connection, How to Write a Synopsis by Marg Gilks on Writing-World.com, and Workshop On Writing the Novel Synopsis By Sheila Kelly at fmwriters.com. I also learned that there is at least a percentage of manuscripts and letters that never make it to agents because the way they are addressed so I found Addressing Envelopes from DailyWritingTips, Official USPS Abbreviations, and US Postal Service’s Postal Addressing Standards.
That has been my world in the recent past. Writing, editing, and researching the process of finding and impressing an agent. Hope you find something useful (hope it works for me as well).
