I'm at the place in my writing career where I feel like I have a solid handle on the basics. I write good, clean copy (few errors), decent story arc, believable characters. It's time for me to get off the starting block with submitting, though, so I signed up for this workshop to help figure out how to get my novels sold (I've got some short stories but I'm mostly holding those at this time, as I believe my path is clearer in the novel market. I'm starting to self-pub some short stories as ebooks for 99c, partly to test out the tech, partly to see what happens. Interesting process, but a whole different post.)

At any rate - the workshop delivered exactly what I needed. We spent quite a lot of time talking about and refining each of our (there were 11 writers in attendance, plus Dean) query letters. The insights I gained were tremendous - it's like I knew all the pieces of the puzzle before, but had them in the wrong order.

I joked to Dean that to truly understand something, I have to write about it, so naturally I wrote about the query letter writing process and put it on my blog, which is called Suburban (in)Sanity.

I have no idea yet if what I learned will translate into a quick sale, but I do have my novel package in the mail to six editors, so I hope to be able to revise this at some point in the future.

Note: I don't currently place any ads on my personal blog, so this is just to offer some information I learned, not a shameless ploy to try to increase hits and ad revenue. Wish I could figure out how to make $ with my blog, but everything available feels rather shady, and honestly I just like to write. Helps me figure out the world. Ultimately the blog will hopefully help me sell my books, albeit indirectly. We'll see.
 

http://queryshark.blogspot.com/
http://evileditor.blogspot.com/

 

I MUST MAKE IT.