Dark Inside

Since I received pretty much nothing In My Mailbox this week, I'm going to skip the post and concentrate on something else I found... two contests.

One is a chance to win an ARC of DARK INSIDE by Jeyn Roberts. As you may remember, I interviewed Jeyn about a month ago. Her book, a futuristic, apocalyptic, dystopia, sounds just like the sort of thing I love to read, so I jumped at the chance to win an ARC. Since I'm counting on at least a couple of you liking the genre as much as I do, I thought you might like to enter this contest.

What are you waiting for? Read the interview with Jeyn, and enter the contest!

The other is POSSESSION by Elana Johnson. I haven't yet had a chance to learn much about POSSESSION, but it's another dystopia, and the cover is gorgeous, so I'm excited for the June 7th release date.

Another reason that makes me so excited for this book, is that Elana wrote an entire book on querying, called From the Query to the Call, which can be downloaded for FREE! It's such a helpful resource, and I would recommend that every writer take a good look at it.

So, hurry on off to the contest!

How to Get Published

Now that I'm immersed in blogging and tweeting and chatting with authors on inkpop and all that stuff that authors do, it's hard to remember a time when I didn't know any of this. Just five years ago, I had no idea how to get published. It almost seems laughable now, but I didn’t know what an agent was, or how to query, or what an ARC was, or pretty much anything about publishing. The thing is, all this information is hidden away on book blogs or in sneaky places on publisher’s websites. 12-year-old me was absolutely clueless.

I remember asking my mom how to get published and she went and asked on a Yahoo group. I excitedly waited for their answers, but when the responses came in, they were all the same: ‘It’s hard.’

That was all. There was no information about how to get published (other than the suggestion that I should try to get short stories published in magazines first). They only told me it was hard.

True. Getting published is hard. It’s been five years since I decided I wanted to get published, and I’m just as un-published as I ever was. The only thing that’s changed is that now I do know how to get published. Now, this information I’m going to share is fairly basic so most of you will already know it all, but in each case I’ll share a couple links to helpful websites so you can go farther than just my blogposts.

Step to getting published:

1.       Write a REALLY good story

2.       Get feedback
3.    Revisions

4.       Query Agents

5.       The Agent sells your book

For the next three weeks I’ll concentrate on steps 2-5. As for step one… I’ll spend a little bit more time on that. According to the poll in the sidebar, writing tips were the favourite kind of post on this blog, so they’ll be a lot more of those coming up. Any post on writing is going to have something to do with step one: Write a REALLY good story. That can’t be emphasized enough. Without a good story, you’ll never receive helpful feedback. No matter how good your query, you’ll never get an agent. Even supposing you got an agent, it won’t sell to publishers.

For next week, let’s assume you’ve already got a fairly good story. Then you need to get your story out there, and be willing to accept feedback.