At his request, after the event I sent him a manuscript (that I had developed from a Storystorm idea), and one week after he read it, I had three offers of representation (though my first sale wouldn’t come for another three years after that). He was a senior editor for a major publishing house, and we soon discovered that we had also graduated from the same college one year apart, and had over thirty friends in common, despite having never met ourselves. That led me to sign up for the Whispering Pines writers retreat, where at the first dinner I sat (entirely by accident) next to one of the VIP speakers. I was so despondent by this that I vowed to take six months off querying so I could focus on my writing full-time. But by Thanksgiving, every single one of them had passed. By July, I had five agents and a publisher considering my work, which had gotten into their hands through querying, paid critiques at writers’ conferences, and even a Twitter event. Literally every author you know or have ever heard of, from Doctor Seuss to Mo Willems, had a moment in their lives when someone looked on their work in the right way, at the right time. The bad news is, at some point along that path, you need to get a lucky break. In fact, there’s an entire checklist of things you can absolutely do, right now, to propel yourself forward on the path to publication.
Now that I’m on the other side, I can report that the answer to the above question is yes, there IS a secret to getting published. Were they better than I was, or did they know a secret to getting published that I hadn’t figured out yet? Somehow, these people were able to rise above it all. And every time I interacted with a published author, I looked on them with a kind of awe. I spent those two decades writing, attending critique groups, going to conferences, the whole shebang.
I wrote my first PB manuscript in 1999, and got my first publishing deal a mere twenty years later.
0 kommentar(er)
