#querying process

[hayatheauthor]

Update Regarding My Sudden Hiatus + Author/Publishing News

Guess who's back from the dead!

Jokes aside, I truly do feel terrible for going on hiatus without saying anything, and then I come back and see that I've hit 2k (which btw is absolutely amazing and left me shell-shocked) and that just made me feel worse for leaving unannounced. So, here's everything that's been going on:

(click read more if you want to learn about my experience at my first writer's workshop & pitching to an agent ++ publishing updates for The Traitor's Throne)

If you DON'T want to read more: long story short I'm back and will revamp this blog Monday onwards.

Would you look at that I'm finally getting the hang of Tumblr etiquette!

Anyways, I know if I took the liberty of casually explaining everything we would just be here all day and I would ramble endlessly SO, I'm going to summarise everything into a list:

One of the biggest reasons for my departure was because *insert drum roll* I graduated! That's right, your girl is officially a diploma holder and ready to conquer college! Although I've seen the 'finals week or my final week' meme enough times to start questioning what I signed up for.

My writing life has been a little...disappointing. There's no other way to break it to you folks, but when I started this blog, I was knee-deep in the query trenches, and now, I'm still there. Does that suck? Yes. Am I going to give up? Absolutely not! BUT I do have some changes planned:

I've officially decided if this final shot at traditional publishing doesn't do well, I'm going to give in and self-publish The Traitor's Throne in May-June 2024. Which means you might potentially be able to purchase my baby pretty soon!

BUT I decided to give querying one last shot and actually joined a writer's workshop (which is going on as we speak btw). I joined the online Boston Writing Workshop, I'll drop a review on that on Sunday, but so far I've actually learned A LOT from it, and have decided to give querying another go while implementing what I've learned. Dw I'll also be putting out a review about the workshop on Sunday.

So, here's a summary: I've created a self-publishing deadline for my current project while also giving traditional publishing a final shot. I also joined my first ever writer's workshop this weekend and will be pitching to agents for the first time.

Overall, I think my lack of success in the querying scene kind of made me feel like a fraud when giving writing advice. I'm the type of author who does A LOT of research when I write, which is why I have so many tips on so many topics, but that doesn't make me an expert.

This workshop especially made me realise I've been making some rookie mistakes and focused so much on my story that I forgot the query and synopsis are just as important. Maybe this realisation came too late and I've lost my chance of traditionally publishing The Traitor's Throne, but I am grateful for everything it's taught me.

ANYWAYS—see what I meant by we'd be here the whole day if I didn't use a list??

Let's get back to the important stuff; yes, I will start putting out blogs again, and answering my asks. I'm also thinking of launching a beta reader project where I'll beta read some of your works for free! Stay tuned to see that announcement since it'll come soon.

Thank you so much for supporting this silly little blog of mine, and I hope you have a good weekend! As always, I'll see you on Monday! 💕✨

#hayatheauthor #haya sameer #writing community #haya's book blog #writing tools #writer things #haya blogs #writer community #writing advice #writer tips #querying process #querying #querying agents #haya: talks #haya: navi

[colubrina]

How I Got My Agent, Take Two

I’m so ridiculously over the top happy to say I’ve signed with a literary agent to sell my magical bookbinder book.  This has been a long process that started in 2017, and I’m genuinely overjoyed.

It played out thus:

Write book one.

Write book two. Query the book.

Write book three. Query the book.

Write book four. Get into Pitch Wars with the book. (Yay!) Query the book.

Write book five. Get into Author Mentor Match with the book. (Yay!) Query the book.

Write book six.

Write book seven.

Write book eight.

Write book nine.

Get a Revise and Resubmit offer from an agent for book five. Do it.

Start querying book six.

Get an offer from the R&R (Yay!)

Write book ten.

Book five dies on submission.

Start writing book eleven.

My agent and I amicably part ways.

Start writing book twelve.

Finish querying book six.

Query book ten.

Start writing book thirteen.

Go back to book eleven.

Go to a live pitch event. Pitch book eleven to two agents. Neither likes it. One asks what else I’m working on, and when I do the one sentence pitch for book twelve, says, “I could sell that.”

Pivot to finishing that book.

Query book twelve, sending queries first to four agents who only want queries and who are actively requesting off those queries. Get a 75% request rate. Query is fire. Check.  Unfortunately, every agent rejects when they see the opening pages, which turn out not to be fire.

Revise opening

Resume querying book twelve.  In case you’ve lost count, while this is the twelfth book I’ve written, it’s ‘only’ the seventh I’ve queried.

Finish drafting book thirteen in NaNo. Revise. Send to CPs.

Have existential crisis on a Tuesday. Meltdown on Tumblr. Weep in my living room. All my books have failed.  I do not know how to write a better book.  Maybe I should give up. This turns out to be a very well-timed dark night of the soul within the narrative.

Get two full requests for book twelve on Wednesday.

Get an email telling me one of my short stories has been held for consideration on Thursday.

On Friday get an email that the woman who handles submissions for one of those agents from Wednesday loved the book but she doesn’t think it’s a great fit for the agent I queried.  Would I mind if she forwarded it in-house to a different agent?  In shocking news, I would not mind this. 

On Monday, get an email asking for a call.

On Wednesday, which is Valentine’s Day, have a call with the agent.  She’s lovely in every way, her thoughts on the book are so good, every editorial idea she floats is good. Like, really good.  She is super enthusiastic about repping the book and offers to do so.

There is an etiquette requirement at this point that I tell any agent who has the book that I have an offer on the table and give them two weeks to respond, so I go around nudging all the agents with a full (four people) and several agents who only have a query. Three more agents request fulls. The rejections start trickling in.  People are very sweet and complimentary, and I am deeply, deeply relieved that I never waver from how much I adore the original offering agent.

I sign with her on February 29.

Final stats for Book Twelve (THE ARCHIVE OF THE WORLD):

Total Queries Sent:  39 Requests Before Offer: 8 (20.5% request rate) Request Rate Including Post-Offer Requests: 28.2%

Year I Started this Nonsense:  2017 Total Queries Sent across 7 books:  456

Takeaway wisdom:  The query trenches are a soul-mangling machine into which we all keep putting our souls and most of us don’t make it out unmangled.  I am not unmangled. BUT, I am a persistence hunter, and I will walk steadily towards publishing until it lies down in exhaustion and gives up.

Thanks for hanging out with me as I do.

Also, this book is so much fun.  You’re going to love it.

#querying #wow that process sucked #when we've sold the book you will hear about it #and when you can pre-order #and when you can order

[scificrows]

Murderbot conducting weirdly specific data analysis on a random detail in its media storage... It's just like us for real!!

#cant believe this is the first SC spoiler post i make #but like. #honesty #the query on the correlation of round hatch shape and uh. terrifying things?? #really feels like it could have come from this fandom and i love it so much #also the 'you wasted processing space on that' #art-drone confirmed as a hater who hates research when it comes to literary studies :( #anyways. i'm only at the beginning of chapter 5 and i love this book so so so much #the murderbot diaries #murderbot #system collapse #system collapse spoilers #𓄿

[rains-inky-mind]

I am once again asking for very specific, explicit, step by step directions on how to write a query letter to a literary agent and/or publisher.

@sleepyowlwrites @ren-c-leyn @ anyone else who can tag someone who can explain this in a way that my autistic brain can grasp.

#rain posts #writeblr #writer #rain talks #please help me write this #query letter questions #publishing process questions

[bookwyrminspiration]

hey quil. hey. what is babel about. youve been babel posting and it looks interesting. tell me quil. please quil. quil.

Oh how to explain Babel. Babel is a historical fantasy work set in the 1830s about colonization and exploitation with a particular (though not exclusive) focus on language. On the power (quite literally) of words, on facing uncomfortable realities, on inequality, on revolution, on sacrifice, on survival, on, as one of its names says, the necessity of violence. On how the British Empire takes from peoples it oppresses for its own gain and justifies it by characterizing others as barbaric and lesser. On injustice and grief. On how empires aren't actually inevitable or infallible. On so many things

The story follows 4 characters (told through 1 main POV) who are incoming students of translation at Oxford University, studying at Babel, which is the hub where the literal power of words is harnessed via translation. It's incredibly prestigious, only 4 students admitted each year. And even though it's the first half of the 18th century England, 3 of the 4 in our group are foreigners (one Chinese, one Indian, one Haitian), and 2 are women. This is not by their choice, but rather because of the 3's native understanding of languages foreign to the British, as they want access to these student's knowledge. They have been curated specifically for this through the will of powerful white men they cannot go against. These men want them to attend Babel, and then upon graduation use their language and translation skills to contribute the power of their words and fluency to aid the empire.

And yet despite being specifically curated and shaped for this, these 3 find they do not and never will belong. They are there to be used and drained and expected to be grateful for what a tremendous opportunity they've been given, the opportunity to be exploited and saved from their "lesser" homelands and genes. As it turns out, this dynamic is not unique to the personal level, but is rather a reflection of the prejudice, oppression, marginalization, discrimination, colonization, and exploitation happening to peoples across the globe. This realization made, the decisions and actions to be taken escalate, exemplifying the themes and messages I already mentioned.

I won't say more for spoiler reasons, but that's kinda a general gist of it. There is, however, so much more that could be said and I don't even know where to begin. I'd definitely recommend reading it--I know I made a lot of light-hearted, joking posts as I was reading, but it's quite an emotional and involved work and I think it's well done. It's very straightforward about its message and topic, and it's rife with information about language and etymology. I hope this helps give a semblance of the story, and that should you read it you enjoy it :)

#babel rf kuang #babel an ancient history #babel or the necessity of violence #quil's queries #camelspit #I had to answer this twice. the first time I almost finished and my laptop died (i didn't realize the battery was low) #coincidentally it died literally as I typed the word grief #my dad likes the author. and so he read it. and immediately was like quil I think you should read this #so I did. and it has this quality of like #it leaves you like. quiet. reflective. you gotta think it over and really process #I don't know if this is making sense #it makes you sit with it

[2demon2slayer]

I saw your recent monster mash post and was like

Hey this is so cool I need to know more, so how does the corruption work? Is it like turning into a demon but for monsters?

corruption is kind of just. a shittier way of making demons. because the big thing about corruption is that it is a completely separate process from demonification, even though it achieves similar results. and what i mean by that is that any monster can be corrupted, but it's not exactly like it's going to connect them to muzan, so muzan has no reason to want to do it or have it done, especially when it generally just results in a really strong monster that has zero loyalty to anybody

the corruption process itself is where, through some kind of magic, a monster is turned from a normal average run of the mill monster into a magical monster. except it only kind works, like. one out of ten times. otherwise it either doesn't work or results in death

corruption is also very dependent on which monster subspecies is being corrupted. some monsters just . don't get corrupted. others will just always die in the process. a select few are absolutely made for the process and almost never die from being corrupted.

either way, aside from the physical changes, corruption basically always also fucks with your head a lot. kaigaku is a dude with supreme self-confidence issues and a cowardly mindset. after he's corrupted, he's violently power-hungry and righteously angry at a lot of the people he thinks have wronged him.

kokushibou took a gamble in corrupting him, one that muzan probably wasn't particularly happy with him for, but it turned out great for kokushibou because kaigaku doesn't immediately go off on his own to start causing problems and instead sticks around to do the demon king's bidding. and maybe to eat people, i dunno

#kny #demon slayer #queries #scramblings #monster mash au #kitsune take to corruption amazingly. it basically just always gives them an extra tail and some sick magic #fae can't be corrupted but the corruption process will kill them #methinks there's probably some kind of monster that's just like . a ghost that's made when someone dies from being corrupted #hmm sabito and makomo maybe....... and they're the two kitsune who Didn't handle corruption well #scribblings #kinda anyways

[coccinelle-et-chaton]

Publishing a novel!

Hey guys! So. I'm on the road to publishing my debut novel, titled The Gifted, which takes place in post-apocalyptic Mexico and follows three bisexual slave soldiers who get caught in the middle of a conflict between the army they serve and a militia whose objective is to emancipate them. They stumble upon a terrible weapon while fleeing to safety which, if unleashed, could mean the end of what survived of humanity. Now, chased by absolutely everyone, they must make up their minds about whether they want to serve justice, revenge, or neither. I've been querying for an agent for half a year, but with the state of the entertainment industry as it is in this, the sag-afra strike era, I am keeping my options open by looking into self-publishing because let's be honest the publishing industry ain't that far off. I'm currently doing some market research and it would mean the world to me if you could help me out by answering this poll and/or sharing it with other likeminded readers. Also. I am holding a focus group with about 10 volunteer readers in December so I would be super excited to hear from you (in the poll or via DM) if you'd like to take part. I sadly cannot pay the readers because I am hella broke haha but I'll try my best to get some sort of gift card or something, as a symbolic thank you.

Tropes are:

found family

a real love triangle is when everybody holds hands and kisses on the mouth

dystopia but not told by white people

climate change core

the future may be dire but at least it's gay af

enemies to rivals to allies to friends to lovers

can we stop colonizing Latin America for like 3 seconds?

bastard meow meow meets sadboy babygirl meets angry dumbass

The Hunger Games, Iron Widow, and Mad Max had a lovechild.

so yea 😬😬 also, here is Them™

#this has been a psa #help. send help. #the process of publishing a book is absolutely vile 0/10 would not recommend #i mean it's fun but also 💀 soul crushing 💀 #anyway please boost this send sorrows and prayers #but hey started from the bottom now we're here #publishing #self publishing #traditional publishing #author #writer #am writing #am querying #original characters #original story #books #scifi #poly ship #poly relationship #poly representation #bisexual representation #bi representation #lgbtq books #dystopia #post apocalyptic #writing #the gifted #the gifted novel #fandom #fandom culture

[just-an-enby-lemon]

The funniest thing about the Dork Squad for me is how fannon just grabbed Riddler and shoved him in the middle of Scarecrow and MadHatter cannon friendship.

Edward was just there being his narcisistic annoying bissexual disaster self and people were just "all great friendships are trios let's just add this bastard, he is perfect". He did nothing. He barely has positive interactions with either Jervis or Jonathan to this day. And I love it for him.

What I don't love is how the Dork Squad ignores Edward actual friendship with a bunch of saphic woman. Be it Query and Echo, the Sirens or even recently Barbara Gordon or Miss Tuesday, he just needs to be bullied by the saphic woman he almost exclusivally hangs with.

And honestly taken in consideration the amount of times some male rouge made fun of Riddler's feminine traits it makes a lot of sence he would preffer to hang with the girls.

#girl night in gotham and edward is their designed driver #he just needs to be bullied by saphic woman as part of his creative process #edward nigma #edward nygma #riddler #the dork squad #gotham city sirens #miss tuesday #query and echo #eddie is a fem transman we exist and it's not only projection

[aletterinthenameofsanity]

welp. dipped my toe into the agent-querying-trenches for the first time in over a year. got my first rejection of this new cycle. realized that i had lost my emotional callouses for my work being rejected. cried. blasted glee songs for half an hour. stared at ao3 debating what fandom i could sell my soul to for a glimpse at some of that sweet, sweet serotonin. fired off some emails to a couple of agents regarding a DIFFERENT manuscript of mine. shoved goldfish into my mouth. am now going to sleep because i, like any person living under this capitalist hellworld, have work in the morning, and at least i have a job in my field to be thankful about after working food service/gas station jobs for six years. am currently curled up into a ball in bed and staring at the dark ceiling contemplating life decisions and how i really shouldn't base my emotional well-being off of what strangers on the internet think and yet i will still be refreshing my email hoping for fic comments. bon appétit.

#my writing #writing process #fanfic #am querying #querying #writblr #writeblr #listen sometimes rejections suck #no screw that rejection ALWAYS sucks #I'll feel fine tomorrow but tonight is for curling up into a ball and nursing the wounds #self publishing #well we're still going ahead with getting my next book self-published so at least there's that #aletterinthenameofsanity #ao3

[hayatheauthor]

I had a dream yesterday night that I got two full requests and was really happy, woke up today and thought nothing of it then came back from school, checked my email, and guess what I saw- a full request!

I was honestly really bummed out about starting another round of queries at the end of August because in the previous round I got 3 fulls that ultimately ended in rejections. Even now I'm scared to post this because what if this full ends up as a rejection too?

But tbh any progress is still progress, and I'm trying my best to look at this whole thing positively. How is everyone else's writing/publishing coming along?

#haya: talks #haya: talks the traitor's throne #querying is a very inconsistent process you really can't predict what comes next #i've gotten a full request within 20 minutes of sending in a query and i've also gotten full requests 4 months later #i've had people say they love my book but can't offer rep because it's not fit for their current list while others think it's the right fit #it really all just depends on the agent's current mindset and work goals #and as annoying as that can be you can't hold it against them #but honestly i can't deny it feels good getting this request kind of like a confirmation that I'm going down the right track #querying agents #literary agent #querying process #traditional publishing

[ghostjelliess]

Congratulations on finishing your book!

...Now beg.

#writing #editing #querying #let me complain #am whining #i added please #jk i haven't even started this one yet #it's just the whole process #it's weird

[mightymur]

[ISBW] The Landscape of Grief with Scott Alexander Howard

S20 Ep11: In which we travel to “The Other Valley”  Transcript   “I wrote it in a blissful who cares? Mentality, like, ‘oh, well, genre will sort itself out.'” – Scott Alexander Howard In this episode, we’re joined by Scott Alexander Howard, author of The Other Valley, a novel where literary meets speculative. Scott delves into his journey from philosophy to fiction, sharing how his background…

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#Character Development #Debut Novel #Grief In Fiction #isbw #Literary Agents #Litfic #livestream #Magical Realism #Querying #Scott Alexander Howard #The Other Valley #Time Travel #Writing Challenges #Writing Process

[kaleidoscopii]

Mega Man Multimuse Roleplay

Featuring both original and canon characters.

OC friendly.

Semi-selective.

Rules | Muses | Writer

#gentle healer ◆ kirin master #indigo killer ◉ ballade #active process ✤ IC #sleep mode ✤ OOC #memory cache ✤ headcanons #query input ✤ ask memes #query output ✤ ask replies

[bookwyrminspiration]

ohhh boy the culture thing is real… it’s different for me bc im white but i also get the wanting to know more about my heritage but not feeling “enough” of it because I wasn’t born there and not all of my ancestry is in that culture… like im of cajun descent and I love learning about the culture of my family members and ancestors and I love learning little tidbits of my heritage from my dad and mon-mon and cousins but it’s not the same.

And the what-ifs are real too. What if my family never moved away from Louisiana? What if the government never discouraged learning Cajun French and therefore my dad was able to keep in touch with that vital part of his heritage? What if the Acadians were never expelled in the first place?? it’s weird.

And to be perfectly clear I’m not trying to compare my situation with yours, I’m white and there’s some things I will simply never understand, it’s just… I felt like you might understand.

You're okay, being white doesn't make this experience any less valid or lesser than what we were talking about--you lost culture, language, connections to your heritage, too. Your thoughts, opinions, feelings, and heritage are just as much a part of the broader conversation

And yeah! It's never quite the same, learning it for yourself vs feeling like you are it, if that makes sense. It's like there's this distance between you and it, no matter what you do. No matter how hard I study Spanish, it'll never have accompanied me through my childhood, that's something I'll never have.

There's also, at least for me, this guilt sometimes? Or frustration? With how I have to learn things. My mother, non-hispanic, will talk about family in Mexico I've never met but who she has when she visited with my dad and I just. Get so jealous that she can tell stories about staying in the family home there, about visiting the family shop, about being there and I can't when I'm the one with the Mexican heritage. I feel sometimes like it should be the other way around; I should be the one who knows and can tell others. I'm being taught what should be as natural as breathing, and it sucks sometimes! I don't want to hold it against my mom, because she has absolutely no ill will and she didn't do anything, but it's an irrational feeling of loss and grief and pain and frustration

I love learning my heritage! The history, the culture, the food, ancestry, etc. But you're right, it's never the same, and because you can feel how its off you just wonder. What if it didn't come with this ache. What if I wasn't in-between and what if I was content with it all. What if I didn't have to wonder and just was. But then would you even be you?

It's so complicated, and then there's another part for some people that I think might apply to you and me. Which is being white and having these experiences and wondering whether you even have the right to think about it and hurt when you're also so privileged. For me, being Mexican/hispanic/latine, those are words that people use and understand as non-white. But they can also be white--though Mexicans being thought of us as white was a specific campaign made by Mexicans in the past to be treated better, so it used to be thought of as non-white in its own right. Which is a whole other layer of complicated. So where on earth does that leave us, white and a poc at the same time? When someone says white people need to listen to voices of color, are you including me as a white person who needs to listen or as a Mexican American to be listened to (though of course I do need to listen to other groups and voices as a hispanic person too, not trying to say I'm exempt from reflection and learning by being marginalized). For the time being I consider myself mixed and consider being hispanic/latine as part of my racial identity, even though it's officially considered an ethnicity--which is not something I'm alone in. There's several studies on how hispanic/latino people are frustrated by race questions because we don't have a good fit.

Now of course you're not Mexican (that I know of), but I thought you might understand the being white and having lost culture/heritage and the confusing balance that comes with that. Trying to figure out how to properly acknowledge your pain and experience while not overstepping.

It's especially harrowing because race and ethnicity have such a weighted, important role in our world and society. So it's both confusing, painful, and has significant ramifications. But! We are trying our best and have good intentions, which I think counts for something. I'm rambling at this point, but hopefully some of this resonated and you don't feel alone in it :)

#quil's queries #moonlarked #me n my club of culturally grieving friends <3 #long post #and then the feeling when someone else understands a piece of what you're trying to understand and process...so relieving #i admit I don't know much about cajun culture or heritage #but I hope you can learn as much as you want to know #I know it'll never be the same as living and breathing and dreaming it #but we're still valid. and our interactions and understands are still valuable and important #we are enough

[herbertwest]

"I should start thinking about NaNoWriMo' I think to myself, forgetting that it is literally the end of January (meaning there's about 10 months to go until NaNoWriMo)

#I could probably write more than two full books before NaNoWriMo if I felt like it #like there is no reason to wait until November if I feel like writing another novel #technically I've been trying to finish my sci-fi sequel for months now but that's a different can of worms #it's probably the slowest novel project I've ever dealt with since I keep restarting and taking breaks #but if I started something New it would probably go faster #I kind of just want to get my sci-fi book into the query process and work on some short stories now though #I need a break from novels #ted's eldritch texts

[tourneyofashvara]

Writing Update :D

I think I did the last one of these in April?? So here's another update:

I've been doing a lot of thinking about some of my older projects and I'm not sure that they're working. I wanted to query Path of the Dead this year but I think it's maybe just another figuring-things-out book. It's on a backburner. I might come back to it, I don't know.

I finished draft 1 of the april camp nano project (I think I mentioned that already?) and I'm going to start the second draft soon.

It's been a few months of mostly thinking and figuring out what projects are working and what really needs a pin stuck in it for the moment.

I dropped the second project I was doing in april, the one I only had 10k of as it wasn't really working. I planned another one and got as far as the outlining before dropping it. Muir-traigh which is the other bigger novel I was working on alongside Path of the Dead could be interesting, but the prose needs a lot of work and I think it needs another from scratch rewrite to really nail it.

But I finished a draft 0 of another project today. :D I'm going to jump straight into draft 1 for my july camp nano project. Hopefully I can get the word count up from the 45.5k it's sitting at right now.

After Vassura fails to predict the arrival of a storm which decimates their people’s dying home, they volunteer to join the handful of those who head out to find a way of contacting the surface. Dogged by the spectres who haunt the island, they are reluctantly aided by a broken automaton who once served those now chasing them as the group is slowly whittled down.

It's a little too soon to tell if it's going to be good. With the april project I felt as I was writing it that I had something, this one needs a little tweaking. The ending at the moment is a little dues-ex-machina-y. It's inspired by local history in the 4th century which is fun (romans and picts and all that) but on a series of floating islands. I think I also want to make it more of a horror than a fantasy. It could definitely be scarier, or just tenser.

#wip update #my wips #writing #writeblr #amwriting #wip #my writing #my projects #i was looking through query letters and whatnot to prepare path of the dead while i reworked the next draft #and like i realised it just wasn't marketable enough #it's a fairly typical sword and sorcery type thing and with a slower start it's just not what agents are looking for #so i was like i'll just start something new and think about it for a while and like getting away from the projects i had been working on #and doing something new really showed me that i had kind of stuck myself in a corner by working on the same wip over and over and over #like it's okay but i have a couple of first drafts now of other things which are leaps and bounds better #i do like that i got so far in the process with path of the dead #i think i learnt a lot from it #but it's just not quite good enough #which kind of sucks as i was set on querying it for a while #but in the long run i think it will be better to set it aside for now #and do something new