I dashed off yesterday’s announcement post in a frenzy of excitement, so I thought I’d try to be a little more reflective now that I’ve had some time to calm down.
I learned a lot from querying and submitting Blood Road. I wasn’t entirely new to querying, but the whole landscape has changed drastically even in the three years since I queried my first novel. Social media, especially Twitter, is such a huge part of the publishing world now. Which leads to my first point:
The slush pile still works.
I participated in several different pitch events on Twitter while querying Blood Road: #SFFpit, #PitMad, and #Pit2Pub—all with no luck. I was actually an editor’s pick for the #Pg70Pit contest, but I had no requests in the agent round. Pitch contests are a wonderful new way to skip the traditional querying slog and interact directly with agents and editors, but they may not work for everyone or every kind of manuscript. They didn’t work for me. Plain, old-fashioned querying did.
It’s a slow business.
That said, I queried Blood Road for eight months—long enough to become disheartened and to doubt myself and my manuscript, especially when I read stories of authors who went from query to request to offer in a matter of days. Publishing can move very quickly; it can also move extremely slowly. I think it’s worth pointing out that it will be more than four years from when I first started writing Blood Road to when it will be on shelves—a reminder that it doesn’t really make sense to write to trends, at least not if you’re a slow writer (like me). They won’t be trends by the time the book comes out.
I couldn’t do it alone.
I had three dedicated beta readers for Blood Road (shout-out to Mary, Hazel, and Akiko!). Their feedback and support have been invaluable. I also owe a huge debt of gratitude to my network of writer friends on Twitter and the QueryTracker forums—and of course to my family, who have to put up with this craziness. Thank you to each and all!
Now the countdown to Fall 2017…