Posts

Self Publishing and ePublishing

Note: I am away from the blog for a few days, teaching at the CCWC and taking a couple days vacation with my family. My blogs are now posting all by themselves, isn’t that exciting? Back “live” with you on Monday. Keep sending your comments! ***** There were quite a few comments last week and…
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Does the System Work?

Last week, Christine posted a comment in response to Monday’s blog post, “Dreams” and I thought it would be interesting for you to weigh in on her thoughts. As you might guess, I have my opinion (and if you’re really nice I’ll consider sharing it), but I thought it would be more interesting to hear…
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Pitching in Those One-on-One Appointments

Yesterday there was a comment about pitching agents and editors at conferences that I thought was important enough to address here. The question was whether a “newbie” unpublished author should pitch during their one-on-one appointments, or simply use the time to get to know an agent/editor and learn more about the process. In the past…
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Do You Have the Competitive Advantage?

I hope you all have read the posts and comments from the last several days over at Michael Hyatt’s blog, From Where I Sit. I can’t possibly summarize it all, but there are a couple of really important thoughts I want to share with you. It seems the biggest worry of the unpublished author is…
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Simultaneous Submissions

On a panel at the PPWC on Saturday, one of the New York editors said, “It is so hard to get published these days, it doesn’t make sense not to do simultaneous submissions.” The panel went on to discuss how inefficient it is to send something to one agent or editor, then wait until they…
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To Call or Not to Call…

…that is today’s question. A lot of people wonder when it’s okay to call an agent or editor on the phone. The simple answer is: When they’re YOUR agent or editor. Let me start off by saying, if you’re my client, I LOVE talking to you. Don’t be afraid to call. Don’t get into the…
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Submission Protocol

I’ve been getting quite a few questions from people wondering how to handle the submission process when, for example, their manuscript is under consideration by an agent, and meanwhile, an editor is interested and asks to see it. They want to know if they should go ahead and submit to the editor, or wait to…
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Yo-Dawg First Page Challenge!

So, have you been on the edge of your seats waiting for results? You SHOULD be! This was a strong group of entries and I was quite impressed. Of course, that made it challenging to judge, but fun, too. Like last time, all of your entries were totally anonymous while I was reading them, so…
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Buried in Queries

I’ve been wading through queries lately. I got behind for awhile and I can tell you, I will NEVER do that again. It’s so much easier when I keep up. As a general rule, I’m going to try and empty my query box a couple times a week, but right now I’m in ketchup mode.…
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The Magic: It’s the People

I had a meeting scheduled with a woman to talk about her writing. I’d never met her before. I was stressed and having a rough week, and I’d considered postponing the meeting until a time when I could have more brain space. But it just didn’t seem like the right thing to do. So as…
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Guest Blogger: Mark Adair

A couple of weeks ago we had some rousing discussions about the purpose of “Christian” publishing and the existence of CBA. Writer Mark Adair wrote the following and I resonated so much with what he said that I wanted to share it with you. A few years ago, my wife Stacy and I visited the…
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It’s Not About the Money

Awhile back I received a query from a gentleman who told me a drawn-out tale of his personal tragedy, culminating in the fact that if he didn’t come up with a very large sum of money very soon, he was going to be imprisoned. The point of his query, if I got the gist correctly,…
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Balancing My Work

Great discussion on “balance” in the comments yesterday! Everyone deals with this question and we all have our own challenges. Just to give you a little insight into the life of an agent, I wanted to write about how I try to organize and balance my work itself, separate from family and other considerations. This,…
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The Work-Life Balance

Several people have asked me to blog about how I balance work and family, but I’m NOT an expert in this. In fact, I feel like a failure at it almost everyday. Today, for instance. We’re on a family vacation but I’ve put in work time every night (not easy after a long day of…
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