Tag Archives: Writing Business

Exit Your Publishing Frenzy in 2022

Writing Career Tip, ,

Exit Your Publishing Frenzy in 2022. That is my new year’s wish for all of us in Writer Wonderland. To slow our roll and our pulses. To find a different way to navigate this very different time. Such an adjustment has everything to do with Attitude.

Attitude may not be Everything, but it Affects Everything. It is not easy to change the longtime habits of our writing career lives. But that is exactly what many of us need to do. Faster does not necessarily win the race, if this in fact even should be a race.

Everyone may be dashing around. Scrambling after crumbs of the publishing pie, ever more agitated as they dash. This happens a lot when opportunities are limited. But, will dashing and scrambling get you where you want to go? Most important, will you enjoy the journey?

What would happen if you were to calm down instead? What would happen if you pulled your emotions out of the equation? Especially those emotions associated with fear. This is the attitude roadmap to follow as you Exit Your Publishing Frenzy in 2022.

Take a detour from the hurry-up highway. Adopt the Long View. Life is long after all. My latest birthday attests to that. Your career path is long also. Wherever you find yourself at present is just one passage on that path. It is not the full story of your writing and publishing career.

Adopt the Wide View also. Step back and look at where you are standing. Ask yourself, “What can I do to put myself in a stronger position toward reaching my goal as an author?” No vague generalities, please. Identify one concrete step after another on the road to your destiny.

Brainstorm these steps toward your personal, individual, unique writer’s dream. Write them down. Review them frequently. Rethink and update them frequently. This is your once-upon-a-time travel guide toward your own happily-ever-after ending.

Think always in terms of strengthening your stance where you are. Toward solidifying your position. That way you will be ready to move forward from a Place of Maximum Possibility when real opportunities come along, as they one day will.

How do you create your Place of Maximum Possibility as a writer? Make your work the best that it can be. Study your writer’s craft. Excellence requires effort, and excellence is the standard you will pursue. At a comfortable pace. Scrambling and dashing are not effective study tools.

How do you create a Place of Maximum Possibility for your publishing career? Build a mighty platform one plank at a time. Be ready to prove to potential publishers that you can reach your readership yourself. You have time to do that mindfully now. No frenzy is required.

How do you create your Place of Maximum Possibility in the writing community? Pay it forward when you can. Pay it backward too, toward all of those who have urged you to believe in yourself and your work. They will rejoice as you Exit Your Publishing Frenzy in 2022.

Meanwhile, ask your crucial questions. How does your attitude need to be adjusted? What fears do you face about your writing career? What do you most eagerly desire to know? Add a question comment to this post, or email me at aliceorrbooks@gmail.com. I will be honored to respond.

Alice Orr – www.aliceorrbooks.com

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

A Time of Fear & Loving

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.” “Budding romance sizzles in the background until it ignites with passion.” “The best one yet!”

Look for all of Alice’s books HERE.

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

 

Literary Agent Search Savvy – Words to the Wise Writer

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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/

 

Homemade Ornaments Handmade Career

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Homemade Ornaments Handmade Career. Both are created from scratch out of whatever might be hanging around your house or your office or your imagination. In our family, the handmade ornament tradition began with our daughter in law, back when our granddaughter was too young to handle anything more dangerous than scissors and glitter.

Her mom took over where a hot glue gun was required. The gold and purple stocking at the top of the tree in the photo is an example of one such project. Our grandson joined the glue gun gang a few years later. I dearly love every one of their homemade ornaments.

Homemade Ornaments Handmade Career. In anybody’s career tradition, if we want to reach our goals, most of us start out handmade, doing it on our own, beginning with the Business Plan. My long experience has taught me Step One of that plan must be this. Work Your Butt Off. Again, you start with whatever you already have, hiding in the corners of your work space, tucked away at the bottom of your skill-set bag.

For example, if you have a mailing list or the makings of a mailing list, start there. Google how you can use a mailing list to grow your career. Meanwhile, give your best effort and brain time to your true focus, your writing project, or whatever your project may be. Then, like I said, work your butt off, all the way down to the bone.

Homemade Ornaments Handmade Career. I’m kind of a nut about Christmas. Maybe because my birthday is December 26th and something in me imagines the Christ child, sharing a tiny bit of his thunder with me. Friends and family are aware of my yuletide obsession, plus the tendency to over-decorate that goes with it, and have gifted me with many tree ornaments.

In fact, each ornament on our tree came from someone we love. But the homemade ones are all from our grandchildren, who eventually graduated from scissors and glue to dough and paint and the era of the home-baked tree began.

Homemade Ornaments Handmade Career. Back to the Career Creation Tradition. Business Plan Step Two is as demanding as Step One. Do Everything Right. Please, don’t panic because, the truth is, nobody can do everything right. Here’s a more realistic guideline combo of Steps One and Two. Work Your Butt Off Trying to Do Everything Right. You’ll fall short sometimes. We all fall short sometimes.

For example, in terms of doing something crucial very wrong, there was my first lunch with a book editor. Thank heaven she was a compassionate soul, or I’d have made an even bigger fool of myself than I actually did. BUT, I never let myself play the fool with an editor again. BECAUSE, when you fall short of doing everything right, you learn.

Homemade Ornaments Handmade Career. We were living in the Pacific Northwest when the era of the home-baked tree began, and every year new ornaments arrived. Carefully crafted and even more carefully wrapped, they nestled under the tree they would soon adorn, waiting for Grandma and Grandpa to un-swaddle them with a full hearts and glistening eyes.

The Santa face and the flower on a blue background and the brightly colored sun, all in the branches of the photo tree, and many more. They accumulated, and the boughs hung heavier and more precious to us with each passing year. They are precious to us still, and always will be.

Homemade Ornaments Handmade Career. Which brings us to Step Three of the Business Plan. Which, in turn, takes me back to my beginning as a literary agent, my previous profession before becoming a full-time writer, and the origin of the bright-light epiphany idea for this final step, or maybe I should say, this final leap. I’d had a good run as an in-house book editor, but I have the heart of a writer and had been uncomfortable serving the interests of a publisher. Becoming an agent was an obvious next move, but how would I do that?

I needed a Business Plan. I bought how-to books. I did a lot of research, but what I found were basically templates that didn’t tell me much about what I might want to accomplish in my career. Nothing was telling me that. until a single sentence popped into my head. “Let’s see how far I can go.” I wrote it down, hung it on the wall, and those six words turned out to be the bright-light epiphany that made everything afterward an adventure. I share them with you. Just See How Far You Can Go.

So this, my darlings, is the two-fold tale of Homemade Ornaments Handmade Career, and it ends with five more words, these from the immortal Charles Dickens. “God bless us, every one.”  Alice Orr – https://www.aliceorrbooks.com.

– R|R –

A Time of Fear & LovingAlice’s new novel, homemade and handmade by her, is A Time of Fear & Loving – Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Book 5. Available HERE. You can find all of Alice’s books HERE. 

What readers are saying about 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 was through the roof.”
“A budding romance that sizzles in the background until it ignites with passion.”
“I never want an Alice Orr book to end.”
“The best one yet, Alice!”

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

TAGS – Holiday Season, Storytelling, Career Help, Career Discipline, Career Attitude