Quiet lately as I tend to housekeeping necessary for pitching the Last Track to agents. Updated the synopsis on Friday. The previous version–revised last in May–could not account for the new middle half; that content did not exist until September. Right now, the synopsis is just over 800 words. It might need a little cutting, still, so I’ll revisit the two page 30,000 foot view of the story once more. Probably Sunday.<\/p>\n
This evening I finalized a list of 50 agents to target. Even though the official resolution was for 46, keeping a few on reserve in case one leaves the business or changes agencies made sense to me. A bit of math drove the selection criteria; I’ll detail it later.<\/p>\n
The next step: verify the contact information in hand. For that I will consult both reputable print and Internet sources. I predict that task will require a few nights of tedium, but it’s necessary, though not because of the prohibitive cost of a query reaching the wrong location. Between paper, return envelopes and round trip postage, each solicitation costs about a dollar. Relatively cheap business, lobbing notes over the transom, especially in bulk. The right address matters because I want each toss to have an equal shot reaching its destination. What happens once it lands in the blue collection box is out of my hands. I can at least make a concerted attempt to get the address right.<\/p>\n
It was fun putting the list together, though, because it revealed the musical chair nature of literary representation. Some names I almost tried with The Ridge Runner two plus years ago. Several I tried and never received responses from work at different agencies. Quite a few are no longer in the business. I’m not pitching anyone who formally declined The Ridge Runner, for two reasons. One I consider a proper rejection–even a form letter–a fair shake. I pitched; they passed. Good enough. Second, there’s a lot more agents who never heard of these characters in any form, than those who have. Better scouting for virgin ears, than those with a history. If it’s necessary to bark up a familiar tree in the future, I’ll do so without hesitation. Or shame.
\nNext up, a final polish of the query letter…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Quiet lately as I tend to housekeeping necessary for pitching the Last Track to agents. Updated the synopsis on Friday. The previous version–revised last in May–could not account for the new middle half; that content did not exist until September. Right now, the synopsis is just over 800 words. It might need a little cutting, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10789","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10789"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10789\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}