The very first Professional Grown Up Writer thing I did was attend the Writer’s Police Academy. (Highly recommend, by the way. Nice people, interesting lessons, and you get to tell your mom “I’m spending part of this weekend in jail!”)
Lisa Gardner was one of the Big Important Guests and I went to her lecture. During her speech she talked about how one of the things that contributes to her success is that she stopped being afraid to just… ask people for things.
As I put together the querying information for my agent(!!!) I panicked over a bunch of the things she needed. One of them was a list of comps, or comparable titles. Publishing Crawl Podcast talks about comps a lot when they talk about queries so I knew they were important, but how on earth do you pick them? Basically all I knew was that you should never pick the 1% of authors to use as a comp (So J.K. Rowling and Stephen King are right out, for example) because everyone does that and no one believes them. (Usually with good reason. “It has magic” does not make your book like Harry Potter. Rejected query blogs are fun to read.)
So, as I always do when I’m freaking out and inside my head too much about something to do with writing, I turned to my friend who works in publishing. She has this magical ability to become an expert on whatever she’s doing at any given point in time, so as long as my question is in her field she has an answer.
As you all know, my biggest fear is that I’ll fail to do something properly during the marketing part of being an author and my books will fail and I will be laughed out of literary circles from now until forever.
I don’t tend to like Podcasts; for some reason they just can’t hold my attention. But there is one that I listen to whenever I have an appropriate moment (doing dishes, working out, or mowing the lawn, usually). And that is the one for Publishing Crawl.Read More »
Bess Carnan 