She also said probably two months to get back on the partial.

I don't know that everyone does it that way or that it would suit every agent in the world (in fact I have gotten a couple of not interested from other agents so ya can't win them all)

I like the pitch idea, too. I'm considering using it, and she suggested a good alternative I might use.

The synopsis type generally takes several paragraphs and you give a fairly full description of the plot including at least a hint of how it ends.

The pitch you just give a "hooky" paragraph generally setting up the start of the novel, about what you get on the back cover and tends to be about 5 sentences long.

This makes up the main body of the query. I'll be happy to paste in exactly the query I sent to her.

I want to make it clear I am NOT setting myself up as some kind of expert on queries. I've written a few and had some success with them but I've gotten a lot of rejects too. After reading Kristin Nelson's blog, I decided to try out her advise.

quote:

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Dear Ms. Nelson:

I am writing you because you represent MAGIC LOST, MAGIC FOUND by Lisa Shearin, and I believe a reader who likes that would also enjoy my novel (and I also enjoy your blog).

Neska has never been out of her native mountains. She knows nothing about using magic, fighting a war or defeating a tyrant. All she knows is that a usurper has killed the king and had her family murdered for their loyalty. On the run, Neska has no idea how she will survive or bring about justice. But all that will change when a dying mage transfers his magic tattoos to her.

Neska's Tattoos, a fantasy novel, is complete at 89,000 words. My short fiction appears in Sorcerous Signals (10/07) and in a forthcoming Writer's Post Journal (12/07).

I would be pleased to send you a partial or the full manuscript. Thank you for your time, and I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

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Well, I made 10 queries with that. I got one immediate rejection, one immediate partial request, and the rest are still out. So take it for what it's worth.

Edit: This does have the advantage of being short and to the point. I wouldn't even hazard a guess whether it is the best type of query or not. But with the huge mass of queries that agents get, maybe getting in and making a fast pitch is the way to go.

[This message has been edited by JeanneT (edited November 11, 2007).]

I also went for a slightly humorous turn, though I did keep it to one page.

To answer the original question, though:

I think I submitted queries to around fourteen agents, some by email and some via the post office. The one that landed me an agent was an email query to Shawna McCarthy.

Shawna requested the first three chapters, then the balance of the manuscript, then a rewrite and after reading the rewrite, she agreed to represent me.

There wasn't a word in the query that didn't get extensive thought. It is the kind of pitch some agents are advising now, but you get such varying advice it's hard to tell what will work. Shawna McCarthy happens to have been on the list I queried.

I know timelines are variable and everyone has a different experience, but this is how it went for me:

After my agent agreed to represent me (June 21, 2006) she shopped it out to six major publishers (July 7, 2006) that she knew were in the market for new Urban Fantasy.

I got one rejection the next week and three more rejections in August. The interesting thing at that level was getting feedback on what did and didn't work for the editors.

September 13, 2006, I got an email that sounded promising. Jennifer Heddle over at Pocket Books really liked the book and wanted to buy it, but it had to get cleared at another level too.

On September 25, 2006, I was walking the dog when Shawna called me to tell me that the book was indeed going to be published by Pocket.

The contract negotiation took a little longer than I expected, largely because of the holidays in November and December and I didn't the copies I needed to sign until December.

In January, I received the full executed contract. A little later I got my portion on the first half of the advance.

On May 3, 2007 I received my revisions letter.

The book comes out March 11, 2008... roughly three years after I finished writing the first draft. If that seems like a long time to you, then imagine how it. One's breath can only remained bated for so long.

I have a couple quick questions, if you don't mind. (My apologies for further hijacking this great thread.)

quote:

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In January, I received the full executed contract. A little later I got my portion on the first half of the advance.

---

Did you have questions about the contract when it arrived? Did you request any changes?

quote:

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On May 3, 2007 I received my revisions letter.

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I haven't heard of a revisions letter before. What is it?

JFLewis, thanks for posting your experience beyond the querying stage. That is very helpful to have some idea of what to expect on a time line when we do eventually get there.

It's all related so I don't really think it's hijacking. All of the REAL information we can get is valuable.

I’m incredibly inept at board usage, so rather than quote the folks to whom I am responding, I’ll separate my answers as best I can. If my answers are too longwinded: mea cupla. To be honest, I’m just tossing out the level of detail that I wanted/still want about the next levels of the publishing process as I proceeded/continue through the obstacle course.

The Finding an agent question:

The Short Answer: I took me around seven and a half months to find an agent... once I got off my butt, did the research and started sending queries out.

The Longer Answer: Based on my email archive and the dates on some of the related word docs, I started looking for an agent semi-seriously at the start of November 2005. I said November 12th somewhere a little further up the change, but it looks like I sent one out from my laptop on November 5th, 2005. Not that the difference matters much, but there you go. I stopped querying agents around December 12th when I got a nibble from a pair of agents (I won’t name names) that really wasted my time. If you stick to the advice on the Writers Beware and Preditors & Editors websites, you will avoid them.

That entanglement cost me most of December, all of January, and the bulk of February.

I read through Miss Snark’s advice a bit more and started again on February 23, 2006, the day after the stuff with the unnamed ones ended. I nearly quit trying for a little while, but I decided to brush myself of and keep on plugging. That is advice that I suggest all aspiring authors take. If you are serious about writing, if you *must* publish, keep trying until you succeed. If you get a bloody nose, stick a paper towel up your nostril and keep going.

In one case, I was rejected in under a minute. I sent the email query out and got a concise, but personalized rejection (approximately forty seconds later) explaining that he didn’t need any new vampire authors.

My first email to Shawna went out on in early March and she replied later that evening about wanting to see the partial and let me know that her reading time was six to eight weeks (it may be a little longer now, I’m not sure). She asked for the first three chapters, but I sent her the first four with an explanation that my secondary POV didn’t show up until chapter four. I wanted her to have a chance at “seeing” both of my “co-tagonists.”

By mid-April she’d read the balance of the manuscript. We bounced email back and forth about what needed to be changed. I spent a month making said changes and on June 21, 2006, I was officially represented.

The Contract Question:

I had one contract question that had to do with a rights issue (English language rights versus North American rights). Shawna got it taken care of very quickly. Other thna that, my involvement was limited to: letting Shawna handle things, reading the contract very carefully, giving my final okay, signing all three copies, making a photocopy for my records, sending the signed contracts back, and doing whatever the publisher, my editor, or Shawna needed me to do promptly and well within whatever timeframe I was given.

The Revisions Letter Question:

This is the letter that you get from your editor once they’re getting ready to work on your book and have finally had time to go through it again.

I don’t know if there is a uniform length. Mine was very long (twenty-seven pages) and very detailed. There were roughly three or four pages explaining what really worked, what the changes were meant to accomplish, what explicitly needed not to change, and then twenty-four pages of specific examples, corrections, or requests for clarification. I’m told that many editors would have only sent the four page version of the letter and let the writer sort out how to accomplish it… which is exactly why my editor is mentioned so prominently on the acknowledgements page of my book. She rocks! I just can’t say enough good things about my editor or my agent.

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Now I feel like I’ve *really* monopolized the thread, but based on the responses to my other long winded posts, I’m guessing I’ll get away with it this time around. If there are any other questions, I’ll be happy to answer as best I can… just remember that your mileage may vary with regard to my answers. I am by no means an expert. I just managed to navigate the obstacle course once.

And I have no doubt the "plug up your bloody nose and keep on keepin' on" is excellent advise. Getting published is rarely easy especially the first time around.

Thanks for sharing your experience.

And you're right. All I lost was time and effort for a limited period. I could have lost an extra ten percent over what real agents are allowed to ask and I could have lost it in perpetuity.

The Short Answer: I think I'd trust in my editor's market knowledge, sleep on it, and see what I could do to take the suggestion and make it mine. In my case, it's hard to picture a change so severe that I wouldn't be willing to come to some sort of compromise.

The Exceedingly Long Answer:

I've been looking through my revisions letter in order to answer your question with more than, "I didn't have that problem, so I'm not sure." It really comes down to a combination of your relationship with your editor and finding out how attached you are, as a writer, to your words and ideas... the whole "murder your darlings" concept.

For years, I would fight tooth and nail against any suggested change. I protected my darlings, fought to the last breath to protect even the most unwieldy of sentences. Now I walk around with the following metaphorical tools: a digital camera, a shotgun, and a chainsaw. I take a picture of the "little darling" (ie. Save the passage to a separate file for later) before I blow them away or hack off a limb. When I run across something that truly is important, a change that would make a sentence lose my narrative voice, or a change I cannot live with, it's much easier to fight for them... I've got the chainsaw and the shotgun in hand and I've already demonstrated a willingness to use them... metaphorically speaking, of course.

Having said that, yes, I found that with my editor all of it was up for negotiation. When it comes right down to it, that *is* my name on the cover and it *is* my book and at no point did I feel that a refusal to give in would have been a deal breaker. It also helped that I agreed with ninety-eight percent of the suggestions Jennifer made. I came away from the revisions letter feeling like she knew exactly where I was coming from with my writing. In several cases, I felt/still feel that she knew what I was trying to say better than I did.

I'll give you a good example from the comments on Chapter Eight:

In the scene, my male co-tagonist Eric has just barely avoided killing someone upon whom he was feeding.

["I shouldn't have cared. I'm a vampire." This falls flat. Give us more.]

She was right. That does fall flat. Here's my fix:

"I shouldn't have cared, but I did. I knew Rachel. I had a connection to her, through our kisses, through her sister. If I murdered her, she wouldn't be a faceless woman who died in the night, soon forgotten. Knowing the victim makes it more real, makes it harder to forget and I damn sure don't want to remember."

Now we not only know why he stopped, but we understand why it matters and perhaps, as a reader, we can identify a little more.

There were maybe three suggestions that I didn't agree with and we came to very satisfactory compromises on all of them.

Another point, about crucial scenes, their removal, etc... and getting back to the basics of your question:

I rarely say "no" or "I can't" to my agent or my editor unless I've thought about it for at least twenty-four hours. In my case, they both have so much more experience than I do. I have to consider their advice very carefully before rejecting it.

When Shawna told me that my book needed to be half as long, and I needed to find a way to make the plot less complicated, it seemed impossible, until I slept on it. By the time I finished showering the next morning, I had a plan, by the time I worked through my writing time that evening, I knew what could work. I had three or four options to toss her way and was willing to go to work on any of them. Shortly thereafter, I'd rewritten the first (and therefore the easiest because it contained the least changes) one hundred pages and knew how long it would take me to rewrite the rest.

I agreed to eliminate one entire plotline and the associated characters from the book. This entailed losing a little over two hundred written pages and a massive rewrite to replace what was missing while seamlessly patching the holes left behind in the salvageable text.

It also made for a much better book.

That was probably too much information, but I hope it answers the question in a useful way.

I would strongly recommend that writers who anticipate receiving revision letters read The Fiction Editor, the Novel, and the Novelist by Thomas McCormack. It has some great insights into how editors edit novels and what they actually mean when they ask for revisions.

You can order a copy from Amazon .

*shouts to husband, who is trying to study* "THIS IS WHY I LOVE HATRACK"