Talking with an Agent

Talking with an Agent

Wow! I'm so excited I can barely contain myself. Yesterday I pitched my novel, "The Majik of Spark," to an agent. A real literary agent! I was so nervous  I knew I'd forget my pitch. I had a pile of paper notes to keep track of what I wanted to say, though I know I should have memorized it.

Wait. Maybe I should back up a bit. An apology first for disappearing for the last seven months. It's been that long since my last post. That was in March, after I attended the Southern California Writer’s Conference. I had a lot of lofty plans after the conference. In hindsight, I'm okay I didn't get to many of them. Instead, I focused on making the novel better. Not long after the March conference I began to realize my "finished" novel was really more like just the latest version. I kept finding issues in my read throughs, and my wonderful editor, Deb, was put through the ringer fixing grammatical errors and other missteps. I lost count of how many versions we went through before I really felt like it was DONE.

Back to the present. Yesterday, 9 Oct 2015, I went to the San Diego Writers Workshop. This is an intense, one day workshop hosted by San Diego Writer's, Ink. The key reason I went is that the conference offered sessions with real literary agents where I could pitch the book. Out of the many agents available, there were two who represented sci-fi and fantasy works. The sessions are short - ten minutes. The idea is to get practice pitching our work, learn that agents aren't ogres and that they are just as excited meeting us writers as we are to meet them.
 
One of the agents liked my pitch enough to ask me to submit the first 25 pages of the book. Literary agents see hundreds of pitches and read thousands of query letters from novel toting writers trying to get their books published. Nearly all are rejected. So this is a big step, but I have to remind myself it is only one step.

What happens now? I'll write a query letter. In addition to the 25 pages I'll send a synopsis (a 1-2 page summary of the entire book). She asked that I add the word "Requested" in the query letter, which gets my submission out of the slush pile of other query letters and directly into her hands. I can't ask anymore than that. But I can hope.

PS - If you don't know who this is, this is Charlie Bell. My pen name is J Walker Bell.