Querying with Efficiency and Accuracy

When I first stumbled across QueryTracker, I was sure I was "almost ready" to query. I created my QueryTracker account, started saving agents to my list, and worked on polishing my novel with my critique partners.

Eight long months later, the novel that was "almost ready" was "actually ready." These things always take longer than you think they will, but that is beside the point today. Those eight months did something wonderful for the time I spent querying, though: they gave me a long time to prepare.

Since I was querying a YA dystopian and knew they weren't doing well in the market (well, I knew it by the time I started querying. I did not know it when I wrote the book), I decided I would query 50 agents and then shelve it to work on something else.

QueryTracker made the process of deciding on the 50 agents quick and easy. I used the search feature to only look at agents who represented young adult and added them to my query list. All you have to do to add them to your query list is check the box on the left by their name, like in the screenshot below.

But just adding every single agent who repped young adult was going to get me a lot more than 50 agents, plus I knew different agencies had different rules about whether you could query more than one of their agents, and then there was the whole "you should probably mesh with them if they'll be handling your career" aspect.

So instead of clicking on everyone's check box, I clicked on their names. From there, you can find links to their agency's website, their blogs, their Twitter feeds, common places for interviews... and I spent months researching agents. In the end, I found my 50 agents. In addition to adding them to my QueryTracker list, I made a spreadsheet of my own. I've always liked having duplicates of information, and personalized things in my spreadsheet that I didn't do on QueryTracker. Here's a screenshot of some of my (randomized and made anonymous) list.

On the far left is an arbitrary "Priority" rating I wouldn't have needed if I'd used QueryTracker premium. The C agents were in the third group of 10 queries I sent out. The next column is name, followed by email address. The fourth column was the most useful to me: whenever I went to submit to an agent, I could check my spreadsheet to see exactly what they were looking for. The second row shows "email: 'submission Deans: Damaged' query, first 10 pages of MS." That person wanted an email with the subject line "Submission [Last Name: Title of MS]." They wanted the query and the first 10 pages pasted in.

Knowing that, I would grab my generic query, personalize it based on what I'd read in interviews (especially the information in the last column), add in the number of pages, and press send. I'd then go to QueryTracker to mark that I'd sent a submission to that agent, and add it to my spreadsheet for redundancy.

Turning querying into something akin to data entry worked for me. With the exception of one email glitch resulting in a 20-page sample with no paragraph breaks, I was able to send my submissions quickly and accurately. It also turned off the emotional part of querying. Every query I sent was a button on QueryTracker and a line in a spreadsheet. Every rejection I received was another button. I would fill in my personal spreadsheet with red for each rejection. I felt like I was just finishing a spreadsheet for work that way, and it stung less, especially when querying in a dead genre.

I'm getting ready to query again soon. The only thing I'll do differently is get the QueryTracker Premium membership. With the ability to open a new project in the database, prioritize agents, and use the amazing data explorer, plus a million other awesome things, it was the only thing missing from my first querying adventure. Well, that and an offer of rep. But that was probably a given.

Writer Productivity Tip: Have Measurable Goals

My children love corny jokes, so I frequently hear elephant jokes. Things like, "How do you get an elephant in the fridge?" / "You open the door and put in the elephant."

My children will also ask, "How do you eat an elephant?" and then tell me, "One bite at a time."

I've talked before about the value of incremental effort for writers. If it takes a hundred thousand words to make a book, or a hundred hours to make an edit, or a hundred books read to make a good writer, then you're going to have to get used to taking small steps toward your overall goals. The important thing is to guide your steps in the right direction. And keep taking them.

Michael talked about having a routine to boost writing productivity, but I'd like to take that a bit further into mapping out your goals such that you have specific, reachable goals you can hit on a daily basis, a weekly basis, a monthly basis. 

Back in 2013, I met my agent for lunch and griped that I'd been stalled at 35,000 words on my novel for far too long. I forget what I said, but I effectively gave myself a kick in the pants. Lent had just started, so I turned it into Personal Novel-Writing Lent. A thousand words a day, no excuses. I feel my writing is a God-given vocation, and therefore for me it fit nicely into the category of "spiritual discipline."

I got a notebook and my fountain pen, and they accompanied me everywhere. I had to estimate what that thousand words was since I was hand-writing it, but 40 days of Lent should net me 40,000 words (with the occasional day off for taking a sick child to the ER.) That would put me in striking range of the ending. 

Nice and measurable. (I screwed up the measurements and ended up with more than 1k per day, but that's fine.) Sustainable.

After that, the next goal was to have the entire hand-written portion of the book entered into the computer in two weeks. Definable.

Then a nice round goal of one month to do my first- and second-pass edits. Get it off to beta readers. Incorporate their suggestions. (That part was tricky because it wasn't solely dependent on me, and you can't rope other people into your goals.) And then have it to my agent by June. Then get it on submission by September.

I outlined every step and knew what it would take to achieve it, and having that goal every day kept me on target. You can't eat an elephant in one bite; similarly, a book-length manuscript is huge. You can't just spit it out. 

The incremental effort link talks about taking 34,000 stitches to knit a pair of socks, but one of the ways you stay on track with socks is having a pattern, and having an idea of how much time you can commit to knitting. Or the inverse: if you know it takes 20 hours to knit socks, then you know how much time you have to give the project if it's September 23rd versus if it's December 23rd. (Er…just trust me you don't want to be doing that.) 

Books don't have spiecific patterns, but the same way you can say, "I need to reach the heel turn today," you can also say "I need to reach 45,000 words by the end of today," or "I need to get the first draft of my query letter written by 9pm" and eventually "I need to decide by Thursday which of these agent offers to accept."

Having a goal you can hit means you will be more motivated to try. Higher motivation boosts productivity. Good luck!

Writer Productivity Tip: StayFocusd

This is a continuation on our series on tips to make the writing process and your writing career more organized, less stressful, and more effective.

If you leave me in my natural habitat, I'm the type of person who will reward herself for a hard day of procrastinating by spending a few minutes on Pinterest. Or Facebook. Or watching reality TV on Hulu. On my good days, I'll reward myself for writing for five minutes by taking a twenty-five minute break. Or check Facebook every five minutes because maybe something happened!

I would hazard a guess that a lot of people are this way. The problem, of course, is that nothing ever gets done with this mindset, and most of us are very very busy. What we really need to do is stay focused.

Enter Google Chrome. Chrome is a browser that allows for a lot of different plugins, but I really only use one: StayFocusd.

This plugin blocks some or all of the Internet with settings that you can specify. If you break them and try to check Facebook anyway? You get this:

Yes, Chrome. I should. Thanks.

My favorite part about the extension is that it works in multiple ways. For the "normal" setting, you choose which hours the extension is activated, how many minutes you can check the sites before they are blocked, and which sites are blocked. Here are mine:

The other setting StayFocusd has is "The Nuclear Option." This one comes with a bunch of warnings, and for good reason. You can basically turn off the entire Internet, or most of it. I use this setting often in dire situations. (I would use it less if I got myself into fewer dire situations...) My "allowed sites" are few. My email, Google Drive, and a few websites I need for work. The rest of the time, for however many hours I specify, I'm not allowed on the Internet at all.

What I like best about using an extension instead of turning off the Internet is that it doesn't affect things like Spotify, which helps me focus as well, or my husband, who might have choice words with me if I turned off the Internet for the evening.

Similar apps exist for Firefox, Safari, and all browsers (so you can't cheat).

How about you? What helps you stay motivated when your own willpower fails?

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The Organized Writer: Using a Chapter Framework to Manage Plots and Subplots

I should start by saying, first, I am not an organized writer. And that's part of the reason I'm writing this post. Until I started writing mysteries, I was a proud pantser who sorta/kinda organized plot events as she went along. But no more.

For one thing, mysteries need to be tightly plotted. For another, I'm contracted to turn in an outline many months in advance of a manuscript. And though the outline was helpful, it wasn't enough for me in terms of structuring my story. I needed an extra layer of organization that would help me flesh out and manage the main mystery plot, as well as the subplots. So I tried each of the following, sometimes in isolation, sometimes all together:

• sticky notes
• colored sticky notes
• index cards
• colored index cards
• writers' software 
• highlighting text in Word
• changing the color of my text in Word
• using an Excel spread sheet
• using the table function in Word
• using a large whiteboard with different color dry erase markers
• using a blotter-size desk calendar for the timeline
• making a flow chart of plot events

As you can imagine, my office is a pretty messy place. The index cards kept getting lost and the sticky notes wouldn't stay stuck. Excel, it turns out, will screw with you even more than Word, and I would end up getting confused by my own flow charts. (And I know that one of the QT bloggers uses writing software with great success, but her name is not Rosie.)

 So now I'm down to three main tools: the white board, which is invaluable in terms of scribbling ideas, re-ordering them, or just writing little notes to myself. The blotter size desk calendar serves well for a timeline; the blocks are large enough to write in, and personally, I need big visuals. But the board and the calendar, like my editorial outline, aid me in macro-plotting: where the story is going and how it's getting there. I think of those things as a map. It's the micro-plotting--exploring motivation and showing cause and effect, planting clues and red herrings, both to the mystery and to the personal life of my protagonist, and delineating the interior life of my main character--that I tend to get lost. So my third tool is the table function in Word, which I use to create a compass to go with the map:  

The table function in Word helps me track my main plot and subplots.

While working with Word can be less than rewarding for a writer, I do like the nifty table function. It's easy to use and manipulate. I set up a fairly simple chart for myself; the one pictured here is the one I'm using for my WIP, The Wedding Soup Murder. It uses a chapter breakdown in which I indicate place, time, date, and characters. I use red text for the main mystery plot, and other colors for the subplots. As I draft each chapter, I go back and fill in the chart. The chart, or my story compass, helps me stay on course in a number of ways.

For example, cozy mysteries move at a fairly quick pace. If I look back over my chart and see that the green, purple, and blue text is taking up more space than the red, I go back to the ms and ensure that the subplots aren't bogging down the main story. I can read straight down the red text and isolate the main plot from the subplots, to make sure the mystery arc is swift, tight, and logical without the distraction of my main character's love life. On the other side of things, I can choose a color and follow that subplot, but I can also see how it is threaded into the main story, chapter by chapter. The chart also helps me identify a missing element. My main character has two love interests; I indicate one in green text and the other in blue. When I looked over my chart I realized that the blue ink didn't show up until Chapter Six. Her second guy had gotten short shrift in the story, so now I am working on ways to introduce him sooner. One last reason to love the chart: it makes a nice break from composing. Filling in another chapter is rewarding, and provides evidence of my progress.

Whether we use sticky notes or fancy software, we all need to find our own way through our stories. What about you? What serves as your map? Your compass?

A Jersey girl born and bred, Rosie Genova left her heart at the shore, which serves as the setting for much of her work. Her new series, the Italian Kitchen Mysteries, is informed by her deep appreciation for good food, her pride in her heritage, and her love of classic mysteries, from Nancy Drew to Miss Marple. Her debut novel, Murder and Marinara, will be released October 1. An English teacher by day and novelist by night, Rosie also writes women’s fiction as Rosemary DiBattista. She lives fifty miles from the nearest ocean  in central New Jersey, with her husband, two of her three sons, and an ill-behaved fox terrier.

one for the record book

Last week I ended up in my basement searching for something. I found a box of stuff from my desk at the previous house, and I pulled out a journal-type book a friend (a multipublished SFF author) had given me right after I got my first publication contract. She said, "Record everything here, that way you'll always have the information handy."

I'd dutifully followed her instructions...for the first four publications. And then afterward, well, I'm not too good at remembering to do things like that. Organization, people. Organization. (Which is why you may have noticed this blog post is about four hours late going up. Organization.)

So there I was in the basement, this piece of my past in hand, and I paged through it. My first novel. A short story I'd published right after that. A short story in an anthology. And then...

And then a story I'd forgotten I had published at all.

Now I remembered the story. It was a flash humor piece, jotted down in about two hours, worked over for another few weeks, submitted...and if you'd asked me before that moment, I'd have said rejected. 

Instead I found myself looking at a page with a magazine name, an issue number, and which pages the story appeared on. Which means not only did it get accepted for publication, but it got published, and somewhere I must have a copy of this issue. Only I had no clue it had ever happened.

(This is the point where my lovely literary agent may be wishing my mother had locked me in the basement and never allowed me access to the postal system.)

I'm going to go out on a limb and assume I'm not the only writer who has organization problems. For me this was not really an issue: I never tried to republish the story, but you can see where if I had, two magazines claiming first rights to a story might both get a little ticked off at the author with a memory problem. That's not even going into the legal problems that would arise if there was major money involved. (I assume the market paid under $50 for my flash humor story. Maybe under $5. I don't remember.)

Therefore, I will tell you what my wise publishing friend told me. First, find a place where you will record everything. Everything. If you get a letter to the editor into the paper, you will record it there. Guest blogging? Speaking to your friend's son's high school class? You will record it there. My friend gave me a blank journal because we were in the early 1990s, but you might feel a spreadsheet is the better way to go. (I like the blank book idea, though. It makes it feel special-er. Like history in the making.)

You will record:

- the title

- the publisher, along with its location (whether it's West Cupcake, VA or http://awesomemarket-dot-com)

- the ISBN if there is one

- the publication date

- the page numbers if it's in a magazine

- the name you published it under if you ever plan to use a pseudonym

- the amount you were paid, if any

Rule Number One for my life is "don't be an idiot," but since as you can see I routinely violate Rule Number One, good record keeping can only help matters.

---

Jane Lebak is the author of The Guardian (Thomas Nelson, 1994), Seven Archangels: Annihilation (Double-Edged Publishing, 2008) and The Boys Upstairs (MuseItUp, 2010). 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 the riveting Roseanne Wells of the Marianne Strong Literary Agency.