MathiasCavanaugh.com

Ok, so I have been thinking about my “plan” for moving forward as I seek to get my work published.  My wife and I are currently on Chapter 13 of the live read edit for Under the Darkened Moon, and I have given myself a deadline of the end of September to have it, and the edits that come from it, done.  Boom, put it to bed.  It will be, by that point, as polished as it is going to get without the cost of professional editing.*

I am going to start the process of querying literary agents at that point.  I will be doing batches of 10 at a time and give each batch two or three weeks to reply before I send out the next round.  Some agents, I realize, don’t work that fast, but I figure it will give some nice overlap moving forward.  Oh, and BTW, if you are a literary agent and would like to see my work before I start querying, then by all means drop me a line to get at the top of the list!  I love it when people show initiative!  It’s a trait that I highly admire in people! Read more…

Just giving a shout out my my buddy J.R. Fitch who has been giving me some great leads on literary agents to submit my novel to.  Ok, some of them don’t look like good fits but some of them do and I always appreciate the help.

I’ve started to construct an agent contact database to help track my submissions even though I am not quite there yet.  I like being organized though.

My database looks like this:

The categories are:

• Agent Name
• Agency
• Interests
• Recent Relevant Sales
• Send (Y/N)
• Date Sent
• Heard Back (Y/N)
• Interested (Y/N)
• Followup

The list contains both loose and hard matches.  If an agent says generically that they accept “Fiction” they go on the list.  They might not be among the first few batches of queries to go out unless I see that they have recently sold something in the Fantasy genre however.  The category that agents through around that bugs me however is “YA Fantasy”.  This field is so poorly and broadly defined that I have come to realize that no one really knows what it means and every one seems to have different definitions they opt to go by.  But I will still target them as well as Under the Darkened Moon can easily fit into that category under many of the available definitions.

I think that this sort of a list will help me keep track of where my submissions have gone and see if there are any trends in terms of out right rejections versus interest.