Today we continue our Publishing 101 series with a look at writing a Competent Query – by which I mean the one that hooks an agent enough to spark a request for pages. Many authors feel great angst about queries. There’s so much talk of perfection, and many authors fear the process because they worry that “the perfect query” lies beyond their grasp. Don’t fear – you do not have to be perfect. You simply have to write a query that does (and does not do) a few specific things – I call it a COMPETENT query. Let’s look at
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Welcome to Publishing 101
Two weekends ago, at the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers 2013 Colorado Gold conference, I delivered a two-hour workshop titled “Publishing 101.” After the workshop, several people requested that I carry the content over onto the blog, to create a more permanent resource for writers just starting into traditional publishing. This is the start of that series. For the next few weeks, I’ll take you on a tour of the traditional publishing process, as seen through the eyes of a publishing attorney and debut author. We’re not ignoring alternative paths, or trying to say that one is better or worse than any
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