The query letter is arguably the most important part of the manuscript submission process. It can either make an agent/editor quiver with excitement at the thought of opening your manuscript, or it can make your email a lovely little addition to their trash folder. So here are a few do-s and don’t-s for crafting a… Read more »
You’ve finished writing your novel. Congratulations! Writing a book may be the first step, but it’s not an easy one. Celebrate the accomplishment, and get to work on the next steps. Collect feedback from CPs and beta readers. Revise and edit. Then, once you’ve gone over every word, polishing all of them to a bright… Read more »
My first book releases in less than two months. There are so many promo things I’m supposed to be doing, even though the editing was done ages ago. The list of stuff authors are supposed to do for book promotion keeps getting longer. We’re told we need more followers, more reviews. We need a website, a… Read more »
Hey there word nerds! Thanks for joining me today for DIY MFA Radio. I’m so excited to share this episode because I’m interviewing literary agent Janet Reid, AKA the Query Shark. *Cue music from Jaws in 3… 2… 1…* Janet is a literary agent at FinePrint Literary Management in NYC, where she represents mostly crime novels and thrillers, with some… Read more »
Hello and welcome to another episode of DIY MFA Radio! This is Part 2 of my interview with Literary Agent Jeff Kleinman, a founding partner of Folio Literary Management, and my awesome agent. In this episode, Jeff and I will look at two more query letters and break them down line-by-line so you’ll see exactly what… Read more »
Hello and welcome to another awesome episode of DIY MFA Radio! Today I’m so excited to be interviewing Literary Agent Jeff Kleinman. Jeff is a founding partner of Folio Literary Management, and also happens to be my awesome agent! What I love about working with Jeff is that he has an eye for spotting books… Read more »
Art is fire plus algebra. – Jorge Luis Borges Query letters are strange and intimidating beasts. They are the much obsessed, much abused, much scorned part of the marketing process. Essentially they are like movie trailers for your book; they create the urge to see more. Somehow, by some feat of magic, you are forced… Read more »
“Writing is a fairly lonely business,” Marc Lawrence wrote, “Unless you invite people in to watch you do it, which is often distracting and then you have to ask them to leave.” This is true: we face the blank page alone. But writing doesn’t have to be a lonely business. Indeed, at DIY MFA, we… Read more »
One of the many great things about the Backspace Agent-Author Seminar was that the agents really dug into the nitty-gritty details of how to write a query. The second day of the conference included three Query Letter Bootcamps in which a panel of agents would dissect query letters submitted by conference attendees. Here’s an inside… Read more »
Ever wonder what literary agents look for when they read your first pages? While at the Backspace Agent-Author Seminar I had the opportunity to sit in on some small group workshops and observe how agents responded to the opening pages from different writers. By listening to agents give feedback, I got an inside look at… Read more »
