agents Archives - Kerry Gans, Author

Query-Go-Round 2018

January 25, 2018 By Kerry Gans 1 Comment

January seems to be query month for me.

Last January, I queried my middle grade book The Curse of the Pharaoh’s Stone. It had some interest, but no bites. After my initial list of 50 agents passed, other issues became more pressing, and I did not continue sending it out.

Over Christmas break this past December, I compiled another list of 50 more agents for Pharaoh’s Stone, and am once more on the query-go-round.

Last time around, I wrote and compiled all 50 queries before I sent anything out. Because each agency wants you to send different material, every query is a little different. Some agencies want just a query letter, others want a certain amount of pages, others want a synopsis, and a few have online submission forms. Preparing them all is a time-consuming process.

This year, I am compiling the queries as I go along. I prepare and send about 5 a day, sometimes more, but never more than 5 at a time. I find that if I do any more than 5, I lose focus and make mistakes.

I’m not sure which approach I prefer. Compiling all the queries ahead of time allowed me to send them all out within 5 days. Doing them as I go along will take me longer to get them all out the door. I suspect the total amount of time invested is the same, it’s just a psychological difference—personal preference.

I keep a list of all the agents I contacted in Excel. Name, contact info, submission requirements, date I sent the query, and the result. Because so many agents now have a “no interest, no answer” policy, I also have a column that tracks how many days without a response. Some agents give you a time limit beyond which means they aren’t interested, so this column allows me to see at a glance if we’ve passed the deadline. As I send the queries out, I color code my agent database. Green for those out, red for the passes, and yellow for requests for full or partials. So far I have one yellow. 🙂

Do you find that you tend to query at certain times of year? What’s your query process?

November 1st: The Most Wonderful Date of the Year

November 2, 2017 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

And no, it has nothing to do with NaNoWri Mo. I have never done National Novel Writing Month in November, although I would like to at least once in my life. This year will not be the year, however.

No, I love November 1st because that means October is over! The last 10 days of October are a whirlwind for me: parents’ anniversary, my anniversary, my daughter’s birthday, then Halloween and all the concurrent festivals and festivities. For an introvert like myself, that’s a lot of socializing in a short amount of time. It’s also quite a bit of planning and errand running to pull off the birthday and Halloween so close together.

So when November 1st dawns, I take a deep breath and revel in the sudden silence of my social calendar. Not that November won’t be busy—I am the mom of an elementary school child, a working author, and there’s that whole Thanksgiving thing—but the month goes back to the normal level of crazy.

Although I am not doing NaNoWriMo, I plan on doing NaNoEdMo—National Novel Editing Month. I got my latest manuscript back from my editor in August, and didn’t get to look at it until October. So now I intend to buckle down and finish the revisions this month. By the end of November, I want to have a shiny manuscript ready to be sent out to agents.

Then I can spend December compiling my list of agents, readying the materials needed to send to them (query, synopsis of varying lengths), and be ready for a query storm in the New Year.

So now that I can breathe, that is my plan for the month. We shall see how well my plans pan out, since we all know how often life derails our plans!

What are you doing for November?

Rejection & Perseverance

May 18, 2017 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

(Concept art)

I’m shopping a middle grade historical adventure, The Curse of the Pharaoh’s Stone. I’ve had wonderful feedback from all of our beta readers, and am very excited about the quality and prospects of this book.

Unfortunately, real life has other ideas. I have queried 50 agents. 3 requested fulls (yay!), but all ultimately passed. The rest of the agents either passed on the query (19) or have not answered at all (28), which is usually an assumed rejection.

The last agent who requested just passed Tuesday, so at the moment I am in the pity party stage of acceptance. And I will allow myself to feel it until Thursday. After that, it’s back on the horse. (A horse actually threw me once, so I know how this goes.)

I’ll compile a new list of agents and start over. Maybe take another critical look at the query, although 3 requests is not bad in today’s market. And then I’ll send them out.

Am I glutton for rejection? No. I am a stubborn writer who has a book I believe in passionately. Somewhere out there is an agent who will believe in this book as much as I do.

We just need to find each other.

Do any of you have a cutoff point for when you stop querying?

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Adventures in Queryland

September 27, 2012 By Kerry Gans 2 Comments

I’ve sent out 4 queries for my WIP. I’ve heard back from one, and am in limbo for the rest. The long wait times are not unexpected—I’ve been here before. It is funny, though, how jazzed I get when I first send queries out. I check my email every hour for the first couple of days. Then slowly the adrenaline fades and I check a couple of times a day.

I wrote a while back about patience being a writing virtue when it comes to revision. Patience is also needed once you reach the query stage. Sometimes it takes weeks for an agent to get to your query. And some agents have that no-response-no-interest that lengthens the silence into eternity. While I am not a fan of that, I do understand where they are coming from. I do wish that all agents would set up an auto-response confirming they got your query, though. As the silence stretches, I can’t help but wonder if my email missed the mark and is lost in the ether somewhere!

So I am back to patience again. I do intend to send out a few more queries this week, but then will likely wait a few weeks before sending out another round. And of course if I get no responses by November, I will probably suspend querying until January, since the holidays make things grind to almost a halt in the publishing world, as far as new acquisitions go.

I have heard over and over on various blogs and from successful authors that to make it in the traditional publishing world requires (aside from a great book) patience and perseverance. I think I’ve got the patience thing going on, and I don’t have any intention of giving up, so hopefully I’m good!

I already can hear some of my writing buddies wondering why I don’t just self-publish, and cut through the waiting. I have nothing against self-publishing, and fully expect to use it for certain projects in my career (particularly the genealogy books I am writing). But for my first book, and hopefully for the majority of them, I would like to have the backing of an agent and publisher. It’s just a personal preference—what I need to feel more secure when starting this new phase of my career.

So for right now I am waiting. But I am not idle. I am working on an outline for a sequel, and I have another middle grade in mid-revision right now. I am also returning to a YA paranormal that I feel is almost “there” but needs another look now that I have learned so much in revising my current WIP in submission. Because that is another piece of advice I have heard over and over:

Never. Stop. Writing.

It is the cure for over-active nerves while waiting to hear from agents.

Patience. It really is a writing virtue.

Happy New Year 2012

January 5, 2012 By Kerry Gans 2 Comments

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope you all had a fun holiday.

I’ve never been a big one for New Year’s Resolutions. I figure if I can’t stick to my resolutions at any other time of year, why would ones made on Jan 1 be any different?

I did make a resolution last year – to post at least once a week on this blog. And I am proud to say that I did it! I missed one week in November, but since I posted more than once several times in the year, I figure it evens out.

I’ve been reading a lot of other blogs about writing resolutions and goals for the new year. I think the best piece of advice I read was to only make goals that are completely within your control. For instance, having blog posts written and ready for each week was totally within my control. Having my blog appear in the Writer’s Digest Top 100 Best Blogs for Writers (it didn’t) is not in my control. By choosing goals where things are out of your control, you are setting yourself up for failure.

So I thought about my writing goals for 2012. I have two:

1. Write every day. No word count goal, because my daily writing time is unpredictable (something out of my control). But write something each day. A blog post, a chapter, a paragraph, a sentence. Something.

2. Polish my two middle grade WIPs and query agents. I can do that. Note that I didn’t say, “Get an agent.” That’s because whether the agents accept me or not isn’t something I can control. I can, however, research agents that are a good fit for me and query them.

Another thing several blogs suggested was sharing your goals, because once you tell someone else you have an accountability and will tend to work harder to achieve the goals you set. So I’m telling all of you!

What are your goals for 2012?

Prologues: Thumbs Up or Down?

April 21, 2011 By Kerry Gans 6 Comments

I just began another workshop with authors Jonathan Maberry and Marie Lamba. This one is called Write Your YA Novel in Nine Months. Its focus is to get at least a first draft completed in nine months, as well as gathering and polishing marketing material we will need to sell the book once it is complete. We will also discuss craft as it specifically pertains to YA and Middle Grade.

Our group is a lively one, and we got into an online discussion about Prologues. While I had been under the impression that agents and publishers did not look favorably on them, others pointed to a plethora of prologues in current books.

We also discussed whether or not readers actually read prologues. I always do. Another person in the group admitted to never reading them. I have found this split among my friends, too. It seems to be a stark black-and-white policy—no one “sometimes” reads prologue. It’s all or nothing.

So today I open the floor to those of you who have been around the publishing block a few times, as well as the readers among us:

Thumbs up or down on prologues? Why?

Change Is Good, Right?

March 17, 2011 By Kerry Gans 5 Comments

First off, Happy St. Patrick’s Day to my fellow Irishmen and to all those who wish you were!

Second, my Act Like a Writer workshop ended last week, and I have had some time to think about the things we’ve learned. One of the biggest things about the workshop was facing your fears. Honestly, if you step back, what’s the worst that can happen if you flub a pitch or a panel or a reading? Dreadful embarrassment, most likely, and that has never killed anyone.

Even though our logical mind tells us this, fear is not logical. We spoke about our fears in the workshop, and they were familiar. Fear of babbling or stammering or not being able to speak at all. Fear of fainting or throwing up or falling down. Fear of embarrassment or insulting someone or provoking a confrontation. Fear of looking like a fool.

All of the above are very real fears. I share all of them, as do most people. They all stem from that little voice instructor Keith Strunk talked about, the one that whispers to us, “You’re nothing special. You’re not good enough. Just who do you think you are? Why should anyone listen to anything you have to say?”

I’ve heard that voice. We all have. But those fears, prompted by that voice, are not the fears that paralyze me. Face it, you don’t reach (mumble, mumble) years of age without having actually had many of those fears manifest themselves. Although those incidents were deeply uncomfortable, I’m still here. They didn’t kill me.

So what is scaring me so much?

You see, I also hear another voice, different than the “you’re not good enough” voice. (Did I mention that, as a writer, you are allowed to have voices in your head and still be called sane?) This other voice whispers, “But if you succeed, everything will change.”

Ahh, there’s the rub. Change and I, not good friends. I like my routines. Having a baby has made me a lot more flexible, but still…I like my life. If I get an agent, and we sell the book, everything changes. I go from being able to stop writing to play with my daughter to having to tell her occasionally that Mommy can’t play with her now. I go from being able to schedule my life around my family to adding in deadlines and crises (in business there are always crises—I remember that distinctly).

More than that, I go from being able write in comfortable anonymity to having to be public author persona. To have readings and signings and be on panels and do interviews, and all of those things that are so far out of my comfort zone that I can’t even see them from my spot here on the couch. What sort of an idiot deliberately places herself in situations she equates with being in front of a firing squad?

Apparently…me.

Because I want this. I want my work out there. And this is what it takes to be an author in today’s world.

I can do it, too. Act Like A Writer showed me that not only could I do it, I could do it well. And if I continue to work hard at it, someday it may even be fun.

Panels & Pitches

March 10, 2011 By Kerry Gans 5 Comments

Last week in our Act Like A Writer workshop, instructors Jonathan Maberry and Keith Strunk staged mock panels. All of us had a turn sitting on the panel. I never thought I would say this, but it was…fun.

Part of the fun was, of course, because our little group has gotten more at ease with each other, and we felt a measure of safety in being among friends. Had it been a hundred strangers’ eyes staring at us, that might have been a different story!

I’ve never been on a panel before, real or mock. The thing I found most comforting about it was that you are not up there alone. I felt a great deal of support from having others at the table and not because we were familiar with each other—but because we were all in the spotlight together. We were all in the same boat. We were facing the audience together, so for that moment we all became comrades in arms.

In this final week, we did our pitches again—this time standing up in front of the camera with lights and a background! Like a TV shoot, only not as hectic. As I stood, all miked up and waiting, the cameraman started talking to the assembled class about some technique or other to look more natural on camera. All the while I am standing there, sweating under the lights, forgetting to breathe, and generally screaming in my head, “SHUT UP AND FILM ME ALREADY!”

When he did finally say “Action,” I thought I might faint, because I could literally feel the blood pounding through my neck veins. I figured that couldn’t be a good thing. I did finally remember to breathe about halfway through the pitch, which helped somewhat. I finished up, got kudos, and very quickly found a place to sit down!

I haven’t seen the footage yet, but I’m not worried. Why? Because in spite of the blood-pressure spike and lack of oxygen, I did NOT have the same out-of-body experience I had in the first week’s pitch session. I controlled my mouth, rather than simply listening to it babble on without me. I consider this amazing progress in just four weeks!

I learned a ton in the Act Like A Writer workshop, and I would recommend it to anyone who can take it—you can use the tools they give you for a whole spectrum of public and social situations, not only those having to do with writing. I will also be taking it again, closer to when I am going to the Philadelphia Writer’s Conference, so I can practice. Until then, I will practice pitching to my toddler. If you can hold a toddler’s attention for 3 minutes, you can enthrall anyone!

I just have to remember to breathe.

The Confidence Game

March 3, 2011 By Kerry Gans 4 Comments

“Fake it ʼtil you make it,” advised our Act Like A Writer instructor, Jonathan Maberry. Instructor Keith Strunk showed us how to use body language to hide our nervousness and appear more at ease. Although that sounds like they are teaching us deception and downright fraud, they are not.

They are teaching us confidence.

Scientific evidence demonstrates that when you act confidently and put your body in the postures of confidence, you really do feel more confident. The body positions trigger a chemical response in your brain, making your “faking it” closer to reality.

Also, with every successful public interaction, your confidence does in fact build. It layers upon itself like a pearl, accreting until your confidence becomes a real gem instead of costume jewelry.

All of us taking this workshop need confidence. That’s why we are there. But last week, when each of us read an excerpt from our work, I noticed an interesting phenomenon.

Everyone did a great job—which is not surprising, since everyone there had a good story and an obvious passion for their work. What was surprising is that every one of us—who had struggled and sweated over the pitches the week before—had fun with it.

I figured out that the reason I had such fun with my reading: I have full confidence in my work. I enjoy sharing it with people. I have no trouble letting it speak for itself—that’s when I am most comfortable. Speaking for myself, well, that’s another issue. I don’t yet have the same level of confidence in myself as I do in my work.

But then I realized something else: when I am out there as my author public persona, I am not speaking for just myself. I am speaking for my work—the work I am so proud of, the work I have such confidence in. I am a representative for that work, and I need to advocate for it as I would for my baby girl.

I am not afraid to speak up for my daughter. My anxiety falls away and I do what needs to be done because she cannot speak for herself, and no one else cares for her welfare as I do. She needs me.

My work needs me, too. I am its strongest advocate. I must use the confidence I have in my work to represent it with boldness, tenacity, and passion. There is no room for fear.

Fear still comes, of course—a mere four-week workshop can’t rid me of it completely. But I am learning the tools to conquer it. Learning to put things in a new perspective. Learning to turn my show of confidence into true confidence.

I’m fakin’ it, but I know someday I’ll be makin’ it!

What was the best advice you ever got about how to tame your fear and gain confidence?

Epiphany

February 24, 2011 By Kerry Gans 8 Comments

Okay, so I’m taking this workshop called Act Like A Writer. It’s supposed to help nervous-wreck hermit-type writers like me build their public persona and gain confidence in all sorts of public situations, from pitching agents to meeting fans.

I was scared down to my socks.

My wonderful musician aunt told me to “breathe to the floor,” but I focused more on not collapsing onto the floor because my legs trembled so badly. Instructors Jonathan Maberry and Keith Strunk threw us to the wolves immediately—into the hot seat to pitch. And just to make our terror complete, they VIDEOTAPED us for critique purposes!

When my turn came, I could barely walk to the hot seat. I sat there on the tipping point of a panic attack. The mess inside my head whirled around like a tornado, and I thought throwing up, passing out, or having my head explode was a real possibility. The oddest phenomenon—that of sitting on my own shoulder listening to my mouth talk—capped the out-of-control sensation.

Then I was done. Until the video got posted online.

Due to technical glitches, I did not get to see my video until the day of the next class. One by one, as others watched their videos, they posted traumatized messages about how hard it was to watch themselves. I agonized as I waited—I’d been such a mess, how could this not be painful to watch?

So I held my breath and pressed “play.” And…elation! Far from being the travesty I’d expected, I looked calm. I sounded coherent. I appeared so…normal. Sure, I had things to work on, but I was overjoyed all the same. If I take away nothing else, I will take away this valuable lesson:

My external presentation does not reveal my internal panic-stricken maelstrom.

Talk about a confidence booster! The way I felt and the way I looked could not have been farther apart. I realize that my fear of the fear’s effect on my performance had been more debilitating than the anxiety itself. It was an epiphany.

Will I still be nervous when I pitch? Absolutely. I will always be nervous. But now I will not be a nervous wreck.

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