Writing 101 -- The New School

Still in the holding pattern, still waiting to hear back from Harlequin. However, this is a much better (and truth be told, easier) route than was followed when I first started this gambit. Much better.

I've been reading a lot of blogs kept by literary agents these days, and one thing they all seem to agree upon is that the amount of authors who are out there hawking their wares has absolutely exploded. Getting upwards of two hundred submissions/queries/whatever each week is not unheard of. Everybody has a story to tell, seemingly, and everybody wants to make a sale.

You can cite as many factors as you like as to why things have taken off like a rocket as of late; you can say it's because certain markets have opened up that did not exist before, that the World Wide Web has given everybody a virtual testing ground for their writings to see if they can actually hack it or not, that the spread of the computer has made word processing dozens of times easier than it was in the olden days...

...and as a side note, I have to throw in at least some of my marbles with this lot. Trust me, if you've never tried to edit a four hundred page typewritten manuscript, you've missed out on one of the grand solitary torments of the writing world. It's enough to make you want to quit the project--in fact, I believe that's exactly what I did, a couple of times.

Anyway, onward.

The new model for submitting to either agent or publisher works like this. You Google up whoever it is that you're wanting to submit to, get the skinny on their requirements and hit your local post office. Hell, a lot of them these days will even accept an e-submission. Strangely, even as the volume of submissions has increased, the turnaround time for them has also gone down as well. What used to require up to three months for a response has now dipped to usually about a month or so, which is manna from heaven for a writer waiting to see if a new chapter of their life is about to begin.

So how did it used to be?

In a word, crappy.

The old model, the one I cut my combat teeth on in the 1990's, went like this. When the new edition of Writer's Market came out, a hoary old thick tome the likes of which you would definitely not want to drop on your foot, you'd sit down with it in the aisle of the local bookstore and write down anywhere from three to six "likely candidates" in either the agenting or publishing fields. You would not actually buy the book; you've already got what you needed, and there's no need to check it out again until next year.

And from there, the game of hurry up and wait begins. Nowadays publishing houses and agents are a lot more free when it comes to simultaneous submissions, but back then, this was most certainly not the case. Rare was the place that said that sending stuff off to another house while attempting to court them was jake; it was more likely to result in a complete shutdown. This is not to say that the waiting game has gone by the wayside, as any semi-regular reader to this corner of Internet space knows. However, more torpedoes in the water equals more chances to sink ships, and since you only have a limited time on the planet, it behooves you to send out as many as possible.

Raise your glasses to the new model, folks. You'd better. After all, it's the only one we have to work with.