Opportunities and Disappointments

originally posted Dec 7, 2014, 5:20 PM by Kelly Lopushansky

This week provided a bit of a disappointment to me.  Last Sunday, I read about an opportunity called #PitMad.  #PitMad is a pitch party on Twitter where authors can use their 140 character tweets to pitch their books to agents and publishers.  If a tweet is favorited by an agent or publisher, the author is invited to submit.  For more information, see the website of the brilliant creator of #PitMad, Brenda Drake.

I thought this sounded amazing and made a note to look it up later.  When I was on Twitter for a few minutes just a few days later, I discovered that #PitMad had been that day and had ended two hours earlier.

Although I am hugely disappointed at this missed opportunity, I’m trying to take it in stride and plan to be ready for #PitMad in March, if I haven’t as yet secured an agent.  I’m also looking at this disappointment as a good lesson to investigate all opportunities immediately in the future.

So what have I done to move myself toward my goal of finding an agent?  I’ve been working on my query letter, taking advice from many agent websites.  I’ve also been compiling my list of agents to query.  I’ve been working out of the Novel And Short Story Writer’s Market by Rachel Randall and identified 51 agencies that seem appropriate.  Now I’m going through that list and visiting every website to see if there really is a fit, reading about individual agents and their interests.

While I hope to find an agent that really jumps out as a perfect match, I’m focusing on finding a top 10 to 15 to query first.  I’ll still query every agent/agency that accepts manuscripts in the appropriate genre, but I’ll start with my most likely candidates.

My goal had been to start querying this week, but that turned out to be unrealistic.  I need at least another week to polish my template query letter and to continue to work on my list.  I want to be sure that each query will be personalized based on a true picture of how I think my work will appeal to each individual agent.  My new goal is to be ready and start sending out queries on December 20^th.  Wish me luck!