Publishing Pulse: 10/29/2010

QueryTracker News

It's been a terrific week here at QueryTracker.net! First, why not pop over to the main site and check out our one new agent listing this week, Barbara Galletly of Georges Borchardt, Inc. We've also recorded three new Success Stories this week. Congratulations to our members who received offers of representation!

On Wednesday, we opened our contest for children's, MG and YA fiction for Joan Paquette of the Erin Murphy Literary Agency, and 600 of you entered before it closed on Thursday. We'll announce the winners as soon as we have their names. We're so proud of all who entered and the quality of the entries.

We also have some very exciting news about one of our group bloggers! Carolyn Kaufman has begun blogging at Psychology Today! Her blog is Psychology for Writers: Insights for the Writer. There she delves into how writers can use psychology effectively in their stories, as well as how they can improve their creativity, writing process, and productivity. Please join us in congratulating her on this great honor and wonderful opportunity to share her understanding of psychology with writers (and similarly to share the psychology of writers with psychologists -- we all admit we're a strange breed.)

NaNoWriMo

November 1st marks the beginning of National Novel Writing Month, that special time which makes writers sweat, asking one another the perennial question: will they take the challenge to write a novel in a month? If you've never done it before, NaNoWriMo will both challenge and startle you as you push yourself beyond what you thought you could produce in a single month. For those of you who answer the call, good luck meeting your goals, and remember to have fun!

You Are What You Read

Scholastic Books has launched a networking site called You Are What You Read, where you can give them you "bookprint" (the five books which most influenced your life) and connect with others who share a similar bookprint. There is a version for adults as well as one for kids. You can also share information about your favorite books with other readers.

Around the Blogosphere

Agent Janet Reid shares 17 Reasons your film script was rejected...in 1925! (I love number 16.)

Rachelle Gardner weighs in on nasty book reviews.

Kristin Nelson talks about how your tracked changes may show up in your submission to an agency. (I want to note that this happened to me with my own agent. The bug seems to be that Google Docs reads the Microsoft Word metadata and reproduces it in-line with the text itself. This may happen even with changes you were not tracking. In order to avoid this, either save your document in RTF format (and then re-save it as a .doc) or else copy it into a text reader like NotePad or TextEdit, and then cut and paste it back into Word again. On the agent's side, if the tracked changes are showing up, they will disappear on opening the document in Word.)

In All Good Things Must Come to an End, Chip MacGregor announces the closing of his blog.

After hearing 200 webinar pitches, Kristin Nelson compiles ten likely reasons your pitch may have been rejected. (Many of which are avoidable.)

And author Bill Morris gives a reflection on the changing face of rejection in The Sorry State Of The Rejection Letter.

Literary Quote Of The Week

"I never write exercises, but sometimes I write poems which fail, and then I call them exercises." -Robert Frost

Jane Lebak is the author of The Guardian (Thomas Nelson, 1994), Seven Archangels: Annihilation (Double-Edged Publishing, 2008) andThe Boys Upstairs (this December from MuseItUp). At Seven Angels, Four Kids, One Family, she blogs about what happens when a distracted daydreamer and a gamer geek attempt to raise four children. She is represented by Roseanne Wells of the Marianne Strong Literary Agency.