On gloriously sunny Sunday 17 April, my writing buddy, Denise, and I attended the pre-Fair Masmasterclass entitled ‘How to Get Published’. Whilst we knew some of it already, conned from amongst other places, the inestimable Carole Blake’s book From Pitch to Publication: Everything You Need to know to Get Your Novel Published, we found the [...]
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I arrived back from my holiday and found my first rejection on the doormat. It was a polite letter, but a standard, non-personalised one. Of course, I was disappointed (swallows hard and sobs), but I feel I have passed a milestone, lost my publishing virginity, joined the ‘normal’ throng of writers. Of course, I sent [...] Yes, I’ve got my synopsis, three chapters with a (fabulous!) letter out to an agent. It’s quite emotional, letting the A4 envelope disappear into into the postbox slot and hearing the ‘thunk’ as it hits the bottom of the cage inside. At that stage, my first thought was ‘Oh, God, the postbox is empty – [...] It’s a cliché, but it’s damn right! The business of getting an agent, getting your book published and sold is definitely as hard, if not harder, as writing the novel in the first place. Similar to when you’re pregnant. You think being pregnant is bad (sickness, lassitude, ruined feet, stretch marks, galloping appetite, pan-galactic weight [...] No novel writer likes doing the synopsis, a tool for planning and marketing their work. When you’ve written 100,000 words of carefully crafted prose, it’s a bit of a sweat to distil it down to a couple of pages. But it does concentrate the mind… From the advice I’ve been given or read, the essentials [...] |
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