Too cute slippers for those days you’re not feeling well, and just want to stay in your pjs, for Georgiana, who writes: Like the majority of people who contact you, I am a writer who is interested in being published. Some years ago, I had a story published by Word […]
tracking
6 posts
One last post for this week of looking back into the archives, and this is a GOOD one. An important one, actually. Something I could repost almost every other month, practically. The gist of it? TRACK YOUR QUERIES! Yes, NASA has a pretty sweet system, but all you need as […]
Even tried to figure out just where in the big scheme of the publishing world Poppy fits in? Or how First Second relates to Square Fish, and who Schwartz, Wade, Balzer and Bray are? Well, though Rexroth has been asking me for a while to draw up a map to keep track of all the publishing world's imprints and how they relate to one another, I'm delighted to announce that I no longer have to!
Guys, I don't want to do this. I WANT to respond to every query I receive. But if authors keep ignoring my advice to track their submissions, and keep resending queries I've already responded to, well, at some point I'm going to realize what a waste of my time and yours it is to keep responding to those repeats.
Let's be honest here: like so many of you, I love to read. I read voraciously. Manuscripts and submissions, yes, but I still have my favorite authors as well that I need to keep up with. When I moved in with Rexroth, we combined our bookshelves (well, some of them), and I discovered a whole other set of books I want to dive into. So, the question of the day is this: how do you track not just what you want to read, but what you have read?
Yes, NASA has a pretty sweet system, but all you need as a writer is a simple tracking system. And yes, I firmly believe you NEED one. This is something you should have in place before you send out your first query. I don't want to tell you how many queries I've received that rightly sound familiar -- a quick check of my email archives, and I can see that not only did I already receive the query within the last three months, but I already responded.