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Is Your Manuscript Ready to Submit? The Agony of Deciding
A fellow writer recently posed this question to me: Is my mss ready to submit? THE AGONY OF DECIDING The short answer is, you don’t know. You can only send it out and see what response you get. That’s agony. You want to be accepted and published, but no one can guarantee that. The simple…
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Top 20 Middle Grade Agents: 129 Sales in the Last 12 Months
What agents are selling middle grade novels? Publishersmarketplace.com does a great job of monitoring the business of selling manuscripts to publishers. If you’re looking for an agent, you’ll want to spend a lot of time there doing research on agents to find the perfect match for you and your stories. Here’s just one way to…
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Meet Editor Karl Jones and Agent Dawn Frederick
It started innocently enough. When Scholastic editor Nick Eliolpos spoke at a local conference, he talked about his love of Spiderman. So, I dubbed him the Peter Parker of children’s literature. And now, it’s a tradition that speakers at our conference must be tagged with a popular super-hero or super-character. Read about these figures in…
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Top 20 Picture Book Agents: 171 Sales
NOTE: This was posted in 2013. See the April, 2015 post with top 20 picture book agents here. The Publisher’s Marketplace tracks sales of manuscripts in different categories–one of the many advantages of their paid services. These sales are self-reported, which may or may not skew the results. These are the top literary agents for…
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Marketing Strategies: Who, Access, Willing?
DA wrote to ask for help in developing a proposal to send to an agent. As part of the fiction package, the agent was asking for this information. “Marketing strategies (what will you do to sell your book in cooperation with the publisher?) Increasingly, fiction and non-fiction authors are encouraged to promote their novels themselves…
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The REAL Goal of a Manuscript Critique
When you do a manuscript critique at a conference, you must be ready to push for an answer to a crucial question; and you must have a back-up plan. I’ve been backstage at conferences, in the break room where the editors are gathering and chatting. I’ve heard them come back from a critique session and…