Interrupting my Blog Holiday to announce that the guidelines for Harlequin’s new Young Adult line, “Harlequin Teen,” are now up at eHarlequin. Click the underlined link to check ’em out.
Happy Holidays!
BookEnds Pitch Critiques
Okay, I said I was going on Blogiday, but I’ve accomplished a ton of Christmas stuff the last couple of days, so I have a moment to pass along the news that Jessica Faust of BookEnds, LLC is taking pitches to critique while she’s on holiday. Here’s the post and a blippy from it:
To participate, you’ll need to submit your one-paragraph pitch in the comments section of this post. I will not consider pitches posted in other posts or those e-mailed to me and I certainly won’t take pitches from any query letters I receive. Over the course of the next two weeks I’m going to randomly select and critique (on the blog) as many as I can. Since I’m officially on vacation over the course of these two weeks the posts will truly be random. In other words, I’m going to do whatever I want. I’ll post them whenever I want and I’ll critique anywhere from three to three hundred, depending on my mood.
Pretty nifty, huh?
I’m not participating, but whenever I have a spare moment I’ll be hopping over there to have a gander at the pitches and Jessica’s comments. It’s always a great learning experience and reminds me just how subjective this business is.
Cheerio!
Going on Blogiday
Happy holidays to all my blog readers!
I’m getting caught up in the Christmas rush and need to devote all my “spare time” (ha, ha, what’s that?) to my WIP, so I’m going on Blog Holiday for the rest of the year. You never know, I might pop in again if I have industry news to pass along or if something major happens in my writing life, but don’t count on it. I think 2008 has given me all it can writing-wise, and I’m looking forward to a productive, beneficial, and mile-stoney 2009.
See you in January!
American Title V, Round 2
I’m going Christmas crazy trying to organize gifts and menus and getting my son home yesterday (which was a 10 hour disaster instead of the short 1 hour trip it was supposed to be, due to the huge snowfalls over the past few days), so thank you to Edie Ramer for alerting me that the voting for Round 2 of the American Title V contest just got underway. Visit the Romantic Times website to read the hero and heroine descriptions and then vote for your favorite through email. I just did, so I’m no American Title grinch. What about you?
Okay, I’m on hold with my credit card company (don’t ask) and my neck is aching from typing with the phone squished against my shoulder, so that’s it for today and maybe the rest of the week. I have a feeling I might declare a blogiday soon.
Firebrand Literary’s Query Holiday
My buddy Tina Ferraro passed this on:
The ability to write an amazing first chapter is a much more important skill, as a novelist, than the ability to write a good query letter. So why even bother with a query?
That’s why we’re announcing the first annual FIREBRAND QUERY HOLIDAY—to support authors who want to spend their time and energy perfecting their manuscripts and not just polishing their sales skills.
We want to read your first chapter.
Our usual, query-based submission system will be closed for a short period starting on the 15th of December (don’t worry, any query that was already in our system will be answered even while the system is “down”). And then—beginning on December 15 and ending on January 15—we will be accepting sample chapters via a unique email address: [email protected] .
We pledge to review all samples by the end of January, and will respond to those that we are interested in no later than Feburary 1.
For more information, please visit the Firebrand website.
P.S. If you don’t have JavaScript enabled, apparently you won’t be able to see the email address listed in the block quote—a spam-prevention measure on the part of Firebrand.
Good luck!