Novel is written and ready to go to the agents. It's a sci-fi, fantasy, dystopian, thriller with a little bit of a pizza party somewhere in the mix. I just don't know what to say my book is. It seriously has elements of all of the above (oddly enough pizza is my favorite food and there isn't a single mention of pizza in the entire thing). If you sound wishy washy about what your book is, I'm sure that automatically leaves a pretty bad impression. So I'm sticking with thriller and saying cross-genre when acceptable.
On another note about finding your genre, the prefix of literary needs to be removed from life. First of all, when you say your work is not literary it just hurts on the inside. Second, what the blank is literary anyways? I always thought literary was the work your professor in Lit101, or maybe even 102, wrote that sucked, but if you said so the reply was automatically "you just don't get it." I feel like any agent who says they only represent literary works is an agent who doesn't like to eat.
This finding a literary agent business is for the birds. I keep reading posts about how people send out their queries to 15 agents at a time and maybe hear back from two of them, and it doesn't give me a whole lot of hope. But here is my story so far:
7/22/14 11:55 pm. Sent out my first query letter to three agents. In that first query letter it had cheesy questions basically saying "Who done it? Read the book and find out!" On top of it being bad, I didn't include my contact info. Awesome, right?
7/23/14 3:30 pm. Rewrite the query letter. It's over 500 words. Not good. Spend the next hour deleting, replacing, redeleting, regretting and I'm done.
7/23/14 5:56 pm. Send out new letter to one new agent. An agent I am sure will not reply because he is in the number one agency according to the internet. We will refer to him as Agent X.
7/23/14 6:01 pm. Agent X asks for the full manuscript. What?!?!?! Notice the times between the last two entries. 4 minutes. 4 emineffing minutes!
7/23/14 6:06 pm. Not to seem I very anxious, I wait a whole five minutes before sending the manuscript over. That's a lie. The only reason it took five minutes is because I figured the email I got was just one of those auto replies. I sent it over the second I saw the request.
7/23/14 6:07 pm. I call and text everyone that knows I'm writing a book and tell them about how Agent X is the best agent that has ever existed and how it's pretty much a done deal. Next week Oprah is going to make a special appearance back on whatever channel she was on just to interview me about the book.
7/23/14 8:30 pm. I look back over the email I sent to Agent X just to admire the awesomeness of of all. I open the manuscript just to admire the awesomeness of it all more thoroughly. I see that I sent him an older version of the manuscript without chapter headings and a hole bunch of typos.
7/23/14 9:31 pm. After debating whether or not I should admit the mistake and send a newer copy for an hour I finally do.
7/23/14 9:31.5 pm. Instantly regret sending another email.
7/23/14 11:50 pm. Realizing I screwed it up with Agent X, I send out the query to Agent #5.
7/24/14 8:03 am. Start a blog called New Author Blues
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