Best Small Fictions and meeting Courtney Maum

And alliterations! Except it’s not actually alliteration—it’s that thing that’s like alliteration, except the matching sounds are in the middle of the words. There’s a word for that, right?

I’ll stop now.

First things first: Longleaf Review was kind enough to nominate my story “The Loosening Grip” for the 2020 Best Small Fictions anthology! It’s an honor—can’t thank them enough.

Second things second: last night I attended Courtney Maum’s “Getting Ready for a Book Deal” master class at StoryStudio Chicago, and it was fantastic! Courtney recently published Before and After the Book Deal: A Writer’s Guide to Finishing, Publishing, Promoting, and Surviving Your First Book to much acclaim. With multiple novels under her belt and a thriving “query doula” business, she’s an expert in all things publishing.

The class promised to address that most difficult of literary questions: “How do I know when my manuscript is ready for submission?” I won’t recap everything she talked about here, since you should probably just buy her book—but I must say that Michelle Hoover’s “desire” test was a revelation. I’ll be using it with every major character I write from now on.

(If you can’t access the book for some reason, drop me a line—I’m happy to email you my class notes.)

She also went into a lot of detail about writing query letters. I’m fortunate enough to have an (amazing!) agent already, but it was still a helpful refresher—after all, the same rules apply for residency and grant applications.

It reminded me that I ought to re-post my querying statistics here from my old site; I want to be as transparent as possible about the query process because even after an MFA, I had no idea how to get my work to an agent. Here’s how long it took me to query, and the types of responses I received:

Date I started querying: 12/1/2017
Date I received offer: 7/31/2018
Total agents added to my list: 78
Total agents queried: 75
Full manuscript requests: 9
Partial manuscript requests: 1
Rejections (not including those who initially requested manuscripts): 26
No response: 39

Out of all that, I received one single offer of representation—which is all it takes! Zoe is wonderful; I love working with her.

Here are some helpful resources I used during my search:

QueryTracker is vital for locating agents in your genre and keeping track of your submissions—and it’s free.
Writer’s Digest has a “successful queries” column that’s full of real query letters that worked—perfect for modeling your own.
Here’s a great list of questions from agent Jim McCarthy that you may want to ask when you have an initial phone call with an agent who’s interested in your work.
Though I didn’t know about it at the time I was querying, the Print Run podcast is chock-full of useful industry information.
And of course, Courtney Maum’s new book is a must-read.

Hopefully I’ll have some more advice/statistics for you once I actually sell a book. One of these days…