I have a plan for how I’m going to handle the whole querying thing. Bear with me:
- I will continue dev editing and re-editing my existent books one at a time because that’s just good practice wherever I’m published.
- I will wait for six months for this querying cycle on Prodigies to complete, researching self-publishing and self-marketing as I go.
- If at the end of those six months I don’t have any takers, I will self-publish Prodigies. You will hear a lot about this and hopefully you will read it. 🙂
- I will query other books as they get edited — Voyageurs will probably be the second book in the pipeline, followed by Apocalypse. And so on.
This plan doesn’t include writing. I have not written since I finished Whose Hearts are Mountains, which I am sure needs serious dev editing as do the others. That’s only been a month and a half. I haven’t been inspired to write lately, but there are various directions I could go — a sequel to Prodigies, a sequel to Voyageurs, another book in the Archetype series, a faerie adventure/romance novel … I have enough books that need to go through the dev cycle, though, that I wouldn’t have to write for a while. But I don’t want to get rusty.
I am hoping, of course, that this hard work pays off. I don’t know why I’m getting rejections from agents except for the usual “…I’m very selective … I don’t know if I can represent this novel with the enthusiasm it deserves.” (Question: If it deserves enthusiasm, why aren’t you — oh, never mind.) But at least I have a plan so that I’m not at the mercy of judgments about “what sells”. I just know that I write for a reason, and I want to see what that reason is.
Words Like Me 