Baby Steps

originally posted Nov 30, 2014, 2:36 PM by Kelly Lopushansky

I've taken what I think is a logical step.  I looked at all the books I've read that I think fall into a similar category as Heavenly Match Making: Meant To Be to find their publishers.  If I'm right, then those are the publishers I should be targeting.  There is one in particular that is calling to me, but they only accept manuscripts from agents, so (decision made) it looks like I'm definitely starting off looking for an agent.  Not to fear, that's why I picked up the second book yesterday, agent listings and lots of advice.

I've been trying to find the proper format for submitting a manuscript to an agent.  So far, I've found a few things that seem to be constant across books and the internet.  For example, double spacing the body.  Check!  1" margins.  Check!  Font choice...that seems to depend on who you ask, so I'm definitely going old school with Times New Roman 12pt.  I don't think I'll be rejected for that.  (Though, Courier...)

The cover page seems to be a bit of head scratcher.  I've found plenty of agreement on what needs to be on it: Title, author, contact information, word count... but not a lot of agreement on where some of these things should be placed.  I've taken a google survey (looked at the top 20 results on google) and I'm going to follow the most frequently used.  It's my sincere hope that I won't be rejected because my contact information is in the wrong corner of the cover page.  Of course, as I send queries to agents, if they have submission guidelines, I'll be following those.

As I sit at the computer right now, I've tweaked my manuscript to meet the general submission guidelines.  It's ready to go somewhere.  So I guess the next step is to keep reading and figure out where my novel needs to go.  I know there will be more before it can go, at the very least query letters will need to be written.  I believe I also saw something about a synopsis.

I'm only a few days into the process and I'm beginning to see why more books don't make it to the shelves!  It was truly ignorant bliss when I believed the hard part was actually writing the book.

So, my next goal is to have query letters and whatever else is needed ready to go by the end of next weekend.  Again, I may be biting off too much, but I'm going to keep setting those impossible goals so I have a shot at a miracle!