Writers Conference Kickstart Time

Writers Life, ,

Writers Conference Kickstart Time. Spring into summer is conference time. Small retreats and huge gatherings punctuate this period of the year for many of us. We pack up our notebooks and our hopes and head for a convocation of scribes.

Most of us want to find a kickstart to getting our work published or better published. But I do not believe that is the most important thing we gain from these gatherings, whether they take place in a grand hotel or a modest cabin or somewhere in between.

The most important thing we find is each other. We make the most of a writers’ conference by maximizing that discovery. We writers are natural allies. That is so deeply true because we understand one another from inside our own writers’ lives and souls.

We understand… what it’s like to labor in the formidable publishing marketplace… what a struggle it is to get our work published and keep it published… how it feels to suffer rejection and disappointment… and the joy of our accomplishments, whether they be large or small.

Every writer needs support in these hard struggles we have chosen. We know this because we need the same support ourselves. With this knowledge comes the obligation to reach out and offer encouragement to our writer friends, the old friends we reunion with at these gatherings, and the about-to-become new friend in the hotel lobby chair next to ours.

A few sentences of kindness can be another kind of kickstart. They can be exactly what a writer colleague requires at a downbeat moment of her career, while requiring little more on our part than a few upbeat moments of being nice.

Our success dreams make us nice to the max to attending agents, editors and instructors. We line up to pitch our projects. We take copious, almost worshipful notes at their presentations. We long to recruit them as our allies on the inside of the publishing world.

In the meantime, we mustn’t forget to nurture our allies inside the writing world. Give what you can. A word of advice, an attentive ear, a shared laugh, a hug. As you scurry to workshops and appointments, take a moment to touch an author ally with a bit of being nice. My guess is you will experience a lot of feeling good in return. That good feeling is the true essence of Writers Conference Kickstart Time.

Note: The photos in this post are from conferences I was blessed to attend 1994 – 2018.  Alice Orr – www.aliceorrbooks.com

A Wrong Way Home – Alice Orr’s Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Series Book 1 – is a FREE eBook HERE. Enjoy!

A Wrong Way Home

Alice’s latest novel – A Time of Fear & Loving – Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Series Book 5 – is available HERE.

Praise for A Time of Fear & Loving: “Alice Orr is the queen of ramped-up stakes and page-turning suspense.” “Warning. Don’t read before bed. You won’t want to sleep.” “The tension in this novel is through the roof.” “I never want an Alice Orr book to end.” “The best one yet!” “Budding romance sizzles in the background until it ignites with passion.”

Find all of Alice’s books HERE.

https://www.facebook.com/alibettewrites/
http://twitter.com/AliceOrrBooks/
http://goodreads.com/aliceorr/
http://pinterest.com/aliceorrwriter/

Publishing’s Rocky Road Continues – How to Keep Traveling On

PublishingTip, , ,

Publishing’s Rocky Road Continues. You’ve completed your manuscript, revised it, polished it. You’ve followed the advice in my last post, Literary Agent Search Savvy. You’ve submitted to the right agents for you, not exclusively, but no more than six at a time. Now, as if out of bright blue nowhere, the anxiously awaited call or email has arrived. An agent is seriously interested in your work, maybe even a topnotch agent. Hallelujah!You think you have exited Publishing’s Rocky Road. Think again. Don’t get me wrong. A momentous thing has happened in your writing life. You have captured the attention of an agent, not an easy thing to do. Good agents don’t waste their short supply of time requesting work that has not genuinely attracted them. But this doesn’t mean you’re off Publishing’s Rocky Road. You have detoured onto its unmarked byway, the Wait-Wait-Wait Highway.

“I’ve already been here,” you exclaim. You have most likely traveled through a pile of submissions and a pile of rejections too, wait-wait-waiting what felt like eternities in between. The current view beyond your windshield may feel and look a lot the same, anxious and skimpy on roadside attractions. The order of the day is once again to Wait-Wait-Wait, and waiting periods are trying, in civilian life and in author life.

Console yourself first with this reality. You have already traveled the hardest leg of this adventure. You have conceived and created an entire book. A book that is attracting positive attention in the land of the publishing professionals. Do not ever underestimate that accomplishment. It is the foundation of everything to come, and it hasn’t crumbled so far.

So, why do you not feel consoled? No matter how far out of control you felt in your initial agent search submission phase, this new phase somehow feels more out of your control than ever. During that initial period, you dropped your work into multiple black holes, expected rejections and, when one came, made another drop into the next black hole on your list. It was something to do. Now there is only a single repository and nothing to do but, you guessed it, wait-wait-wait.

So, how do you keep from losing your mind? Right here, I’m going to say something that sounds so lame, so Pollyannaish you will want to climb through the screen and wring my neck. To jeopardize my neck even further, I must preface that something by agreeing with you. This phase of your struggle to become published feels so far out of your control because it is. And, here comes the I-get-throttled part. You must simply let go and travel on.

What did she say? I said you must let go of longing for control and let your work find its way. Harder still, you must have confidence that it will. While you attempt, however imperfectly, to build this confidence, turn to your first powerful resource, the rest of us, your writer friends in your writers’ community. We are your shoulders to lean and/or cry upon. Whether you need a strategy session, a consult, or just a boost in the spirits-up department, we are here.

Next, get back to work. If you’ve not already done so, dive deep-down into your next book or continue your series. Professional authors are forever moving on to the next project, which keeps us from bogging down with anxiety over the one that’s out there in the publishing world ozone. It also guarantees we will have a continuing career, bent upon producing a shelf load of books eventually. Disciplined forward momentum prevents, or at least lessens the severity of, running out of fuel along Publishing’s Rocky Road.

Never forget that you are tenacious. You have traversed this far on an obstacle-strewn path. From that process, you have forged your own personal template for doing so again and again with each new project. Have faith that will be the case, and take my word as well. I have watched it happen with countless authors, including myself.

In the meantime, there is the joy of the doing. The joy of the writing work, at every stage of its challenging course. You are on that course, moving along it, as well as deeper into it. Publishing’s Rocky Road Continues, but you, with fire in your belly, are ready for the ride. Bon voyage.

Alice Orr – www.aliceorrbooks.com

A Wrong Way Home – Alice Orr’s Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Series Book 1 – is a FREE eBook HERE. Enjoy!A Wrong Way Home

Alice’s latest novel – A Time of Fear & Loving– Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Series Book 5 – is available HERE. Praise for A Time of Fear & Loving. “Alice Orr is the queen of ramped-up stakes and page-turning suspense.” “Warning. Don’t read before bed. You won’t want to sleep.” “The tension in this novel is through the roof.” “I never want an Alice Orr book to end.” “The best one yet!” “Budding romance sizzles in the background until it ignites with passion.”

Look for all of Alice’s books HERE.

https://www.facebook.com/alibettewrites/
http://twitter.com/AliceOrrBooks/
http://goodreads.com/aliceorr/
http://pinterest.com/aliceorrwriter/

Literary Agent Search Savvy – Words to the Wise Writer

PublishingTip, ,

Literary Agent Search Savvy. Where have all the agents gone? A writers’ conference organizer contacted me recently to ask why they were having so much difficulty finding participants for their annual agents’ panel. From what I hear, this is not the only group having that problem. In fact, individual authors experience the same scarcity.

Agents are selective. A difficult species to pin down, even back when I wasa member of that species (check out the above visual). Literary agent accessibility has always been a thorny issue. Agents, and their mother ship companies, have always been selective regarding who goes where in terms of conference participation, which is an investment for them after all, even more so now than in the past.

Traditional Publishing has become an almost totally bottom-line business. For agencies, that means they must justify each investment they make of time and resources. Not only the time and effort spent on being at an event, but the time and effort required to address the cascade of manuscript submissions that result from every such appearance.

Bottom-line thinking, agent style. The essential consideration for any agency worth its AAR membership is this. How many author contacts are we likely to make at this event that will lead to taking on a client who attracts a publisher and sells lots of books for that house? The viability of any agency depends on its ability to scout out authors who will satisfy publishers.

This concern has to do with commerce. Many authors, and authors’ organizations, make no pretense of being commercial in focus. Others claim otherwise. Their primary goal is not necessarily to sell the work, or so they say. They are instead all about freeing the writerly voice, exploring the writerly self, and encouraging that voice and self to define and speak the writer’s personal truth.

A worthy aspiration for sure. But, to the publishing establishment—agents, editors, publishing houses—that focus reads as not particularly marketable, whether this is entirely accurate or not. All of which puts writers’ groups, and writers, at a definite disadvantage when it comes to attracting agents, either to attend author events or to represent an individual writer’s work. But do not despair. I have a couple of suggestions.

My first and most sweeping suggestion is to modify your target search. Seek out, in addition to literary agents, people who know a lot about the publishing business and how to succeed there. Let’s call them Mavens. A writers’ event has a better chance of mounting a successful panel when there are mavens in the mix. An individual writer gifts herself with access to wisdom and experience when she cultivates a maven mentor.

Thus, value is added. These mavens know the world of writing and publishing like it is, as we used to say, and they tell it like it is. They shoot from the hip and are, frankly, much more forthcoming with the real skinny than most agents can afford to be. Another agent bottom line is that she must not risk alienating publishers.

Still, almost every writer wants to get up-close with agents. More specifically, you need to find agents who will actually be willing to show up for a panel and/or read your work. So, here’s my second suggestion. Identify established agencies and target the young, the talented and the hungry on their staffs. In other words, don’t pursue the headliners. They already have a stable of authors and are far less eager than their newer colleagues to go trolling for more clients.

Contact agents who are lower on the agency totem pole. Go to the agency website. If they don’t have a good one, that’s a heads-up that they’re not very deep into the publishing game. Find the assistant editors and associates. Check their credentials. Each should have a bio on the site that details the submissions they prefer. Google them too. Any agent worth that designation has an online presence.

Choose the ones that suit your interests and needs. Don’t worry that you shouldn’t be scouting the second string. Successful agencies hire talented new agents they believe can bring in authors that will attract publishers. These agencies groom and train their recruits and closely supervise their work. The top dogs prepare their pups to become champions – your champions.

“Hungry” means these starlets don’t yet have a full stable of clients and are eager to find good writers with good work. Let’s face it, that means marketable work, books that will sell. If you want a stall in that stable, my words to the wise are these. You must adopt the bottom line too. If you need to find out how, return to my first suggestion. Ask a maven. That’s real Literary Agent Search Savvy.  Alice Orr – www.aliceorrbooks.com

A Wrong Way Home – Alice Orr’s Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Series Book 1 – is a FREE eBook HERE. Enjoy!

Alice’s latest novel – A Time of Fear & Loving–Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Series Book 5– is available HERE.  Praise for A Time of Fear & Loving. “Alice Orr is the queen of ramped-up stakes and page-turning suspense.” “Warning. Don’t read before bed. You won’t want to sleep.” “The tension in this novel is through the roof.” “I never want an Alice Orr book to end.” “The best one yet!” “Budding romance sizzles in the background until it ignites with passion.”

Look for all of Alice’s books HERE.

https://www.facebook.com/alibettewrites/
http://twitter.com/AliceOrrBooks/
http://goodreads.com/aliceorr/
http://pinterest.com/aliceorrwriter/