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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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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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Saying, “NO!” to an Editor
Hurrah! You have a revision letter from an editor and you are going to make every single, solitary, revision the editor asks for. Right? Maybe. When can you say, “No,” to an editor? You can refuse a contract for any number of reasons. Money, vision for the published manuscript, an unkind word. You never have…
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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…
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Why I Don’t Do Cold Submissions–Usually
How to Sell Your Mss to the Right Editor When you write “The End” on the last page of your story (novel or picture book), it’s time to start marketing the story to editors. For this, you need a business hat. Let’s think about marketing. If you sell Jaguars–those beautiful classic cars–what is the best…
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What is a Real Writer?
What is a “real writer”? Am I one of those who could be called a “real writer”? I still labor under the burden that real writers are published and published well. And that slippery term, “published well” constantly moves away from me, a goal that is ephemeral, a tiny wisp of a cloud. I never…