Update: The winner of the book giveaway is Dean Miller. Dean, Chuck will send you your choice of the 2011 Guide to Literary Agents or Formatting & Submitting Your Manuscript. Congrats! One of the best blogs around for writers is Chuck Sambuchino’s Guide to Literary Agents. (And I’m not just saying that because Chuck lets […]
I love practical advice. What do I love even more? Practical advice with examples. So today I’m sharing the query I sent to literary agents with the hopes that it will help you create your own pitch letter. I’m no expert on this, and my query isn’t perfect. But it’s the result of a lot […]
So you’re writing a memoir. Should you complete your manuscript before approaching agents? Or query with only a proposal? I’ve touched on this topic here and here and here, but it comes up so often in the memoir-writing community — and there’s so little advice available online — that it’s time I addressed it outright. […]
As I research literary agents, deciding which to query when the time comes, I’ve noticed that some don’t accept e-mail queries. Any idea why they do this? My first reaction is that an agent who doesn’t accept e-mail queries isn’t Web-savvy, hasn’t reached the level of comfort with the Internet that I’d want in an […]
Now that y’all have seen my query, as well as a description of how I picked literary agents to query, here’s a question to authors who have been through this already: Should I query all 12 agents at once? Or would it be smarter to query the first half and wait for feedback? Here’s the […]
More than three months have passed since I returned home from Africa, determined to write a travel memoir. As I hole myself up in my home office and coffee-shop hop with my laptop, friends and family ask, “How’s the book coming?” I know what they’re really thinking: What has she been doing all this time? […]