It's been incredibly busy since I elected to enter the Amazon Contest. Up at 6:30am I've spent every spare minute, editing, revising, questioning, re-doing, grumping, editing, and re-doing again, my pitch, my excerpt and my manuscript. And that wasn't just today, it was on the weekend too.
Wrote a great initial pitch, which though having been told the writing was glorious, was also told is was glorious for a recipe book. Oops. Revamp. revamp. revamp. The other authors in the contest are awesome. Encouraging and more than helpful with their advice.
In between all the re-vamping recieved a few emails. Here's the first:
Dear. Ms. McLellan,
Thank you for your query. As interesting as your novel sounds, I don't believe I would be the best agent to represent your work. Best of luck to you though, and thank you for thinking of me.
Cordially,
xxxx
My response?
#@%$ a duck.
But I didn't send that. I did however, email her back to ask if she knew of anyone who might be the best to represent me. Who wants to bet on whether or not I get a response?
More revamping, obsessing and emailing of a great friend who has more than generously encouraged me since reading my manuscript. He has agreed to be my 'author breakdown' spam buddy by virtue of his non-response when I asked if I was bugging him yet.
Then, later on, another email:
Thank you for your submission to XXX
Currently, I'm not considering new material at this time.
I will be requesting projects again starting in April 2010.
I invite you to resubmit your query in April.
I will be deleting all those coming in from Feb. 1st 2010 to March 31st, 2010.
All the best,
XXX
Sure, great, just fine. I spent hours and hours, revising, re-working, re-doing, re-everything, and you just take your finger and in a millisecond, delete everything I've done.
I will not re-submit.
But me and a thousand or so other authors, may just end up going bonkers. Buy books people. They are treasures and all those people including publishers and agents who take the majority of the money from the books we've written...well...they're hurting. Help them make their 20% so that we can make our buck and continue to be published. Along with the magic of the written word, books contain so much more that isn't seen: intense commitment and devotion, dedication, hours and hours and days and weeks of passionate slogging along as the story builds, obsession and attachment, blood, sweat, tears, high blood pressure, headaches, sacrifice, numb fingers.....If you could only see what each book you bought really contained, you'd be willing to pay quadruple the price and would believe you'd recieved an awesome deal.
I'm exhausted and done for the day. Smart thinking of the friend who suggested I detail all this minute goings on. It really isn't so minute after all. And buy books. My sanity and the sanity of thousands of others depends on you!
