Midian Cometh

I love taking time off from work.  Who doesn't? Not only am I NOT slavishly doing what I get paid to do, I'm also enjoying a three week break from school.  There's been no financial accounting for me last week, or this week.  And I get next week off from that dry material as well.

The last time I had time off, I busily readied Urban Mythos for self publishing as an e-book, and I got it up on both Amazon and Barnes & Noble.  This week, I spent some additional time on the aforementioned YA Urban Fantasy and published it on Smashwords.

So now for my next trick.  On January 21st, I will publish my earlier novel, The Children of Midian. It needed some serious polish from whence I last looked at it, but I am hard at work readying it.  This is an upper middle grade novel, with some slightly darker themes, but still firmly targeted at the middle school reader. 


Elliot Hanson doesn’t live in an ordinary town, for it harbors a dark secret that leads him out of our world and into Midian. The thirteen-year-old army brat discovers friendship in a community of lost children, but he also finds a legion of werewolves set against them. Feeding on imagination, these ruthless killers serve an even darker leader who intends to destroy every last child, leaving Elliot with no choice but to fight for their lives.

Look for the e-book on January 21st on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, and many other fine booksellers.

Promoting Tips for Writers

Dawné Dominique has posted an absolutely fantastic list of promotion tips for writers. This is almost as comprehensive as you can get and I can't stop gushing over how helpful the thing is. Now Dawné's blog is for the eighteen and older crowd as she's got a bit of mischief going on there. *wink* and *nod*  I'm posting her link, because she deserves full credit for this incredible work. If you are under eighteen, or have an aversion to vampires and half naked cowboys, I've also got a link to Frankie's blog, where she reposted Dawne's set of tips (with Dawne's permission of course).

For the eighteen and older crowd (you know who you are).

Everyone else can check it out here.

Thank you, Dawné!

An update to the agent and publisher list

Many of you may know I maintain a substantial list of Young Adult and Middle Grade publishers and literary agents. It's been over two years since I started updating it. The list started out as something I did for myself - a place to capture all the potential agents or editors I might query. Over time, I opened up the list to the cool folks of the Young Adult Novel Workshop over at writing.com, and then to the rest of the writing.com community. Maybe a year ago, I opened it up to everyone, and much to my surprise, the thing's become reasonably popular.

Fire up google and type "middle grade publishers". Today it comes up second in the search results. "YA agents"? third, or maybe second, if you consider the first two sites are presented in a hierarchy. What's pretty cool is that I really haven't tried to make it easily found, so it's been organic in nature.


I try to keep the content fresh, often checking that the links still work and that the agents and publishers are still in business. I'm not paid for putting anyone on the list. In fact, here's the "caveat emptor" I stick at the top of the list:

---

Publishers and agents appear on this list because I found them in any number of relevant places: WritersMarket, Publisher's Marketplace, conferences, word-of-mouth, etc. I have only done some basic checking on each of these folks in sources such as Predators & Editors and AbsoluteWrite. Things change rapidly, so before you consider or contact anyone on this list, please do your own research.

If you see anyone on this list that you feel is disreputable, please contact me through my blog (That's this place)

---

Going forward, I'll post some information whenever I make any updates to the list, which I did today.

Publishers added
Lands Atlantic Publishing
Action Publishing
Silver Moon Press

Literary Agents added
Levine Greenberg Literary Agency
DeFiore and Company
Betsy Amster Literary Enterprises

Sadly, Jenny Rappaport has given up on the agenting biz, so I've dropped her from the list. I also dropped a couple other links and fixed some others.

I hope this helps all you authors in search of a YA or Middle Grade agent or publisher.

To write or to query or to ABNA?

As most of you know, I've been heads down lately on my YA urban fantasy, Mythos. This has left me precious little time to focus on finding an agent or publishing venue for The Children of Midian. It's actually been liberating not to think or worry about Midian over the last few months.

It's the new year, though, and with the new year comes new ideals and resolutions. Should I spend time searching out some agents to query? Should I submit directly to some small press publishers? If I do this, I probably need to go back and reshape my query, focusing on Midian's crossover nature - it's somewhere between middle grade and young adult, and the word count reflects it. Curse that word count.

Another intriguing option is the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest. This year, they've added a Young Adult Literature category, which is sweet, because that's all me. I gave this contest a shot last year, but like American Idol or any fun amusement park ride, why not go again? Considering they've added that YA niche, I think it gives YA writers a better shot.

I might also do both. Or neither. I'm so engrossed in Mythos and want to see it through, that I'd prefer fewer distractions over and above life and family and work and blogging and tweeting.

I wonder what I will do!

A little Mythos and a lot of the agent/publisher list.

I seem to have forgotten that my blog isn't all about Mythos/Creatures. I have been busy writing, though. I'm in the middle of a chapter with its own complexities. It's really the first time I've ever written a romantic scene. I mean this sucker is by no means a romance novel, but there's teens with raging hormones, so y'know, it kind of comes up. But I really don't want to leave this chapter without certain aspects of it being "just right". I think I'm getting close to where I want it to be. But I'm ready to move on to the second half of the chapter.

I also spent time last night with something I've neglected for over a month. I have been maintaining a list of publishers and agents for the middle grade and young adult market. I do this in my portfolio on Writing.com. Since I write in the realm of MG/YA, and a lot of my writer friends do the same, this started out as a way for me to share with them some of the info I'd found. Considering all that I've learned from these folks, it was the absolute least I could do.

Medeia Sharif complimented me today on the list, and this caused me to go back and look at it in the larger sense. I'm generally in there adding or editing the content, validating the links and whatnot. This time I just looked at the whole. The first thing I noticed was that I actually began this thing over two years ago. What? Are you kidding me? Has it been that long? Sheesh.

I also noticed the size. My list currently has 36 publishers, and 104, count 'em, 104 agents. It's like I'm a stalker or something. I've also got some other helpful links on the list. I try to update the page about once a month. Change appears to be a constant within the publishing industry, so there's never a shortage of new information to put out there.

So please check out the list, use it, share it, and I'll try to keep it up to date. And if you have anything you think I should add or drop, please let me know!

A submission and the ten year old editor

I've done it. I've submitted The Children of Midian directly to a new small press publisher. Risky, I suppose, but I'm willing to give it a shot. Let's see what happens. I've done a bunch of research on Absolute Write, which is key to a lot of my decision making. They are not on P&E yet, so let's see how the ride goes. I'll let you all know as soon as I know anything.

I've spent nearly the last 24 hours researching small houses. It seems like many of the newer and successful smaller houses got picked up by or merged with others. Front Street Press joined Boyds Mills Press about five years ago after a very successful ten year run.

My about-to-be ten-year-old daughter has been reading Midian, and she's proved to be a terrific editor. I renamed one of my characters a while back, and in one of the later chapters, she spotted the old name listed once or twice. A little background makes this an interesting lesson to learn.

The leader of the children in Midian goes by the name of Mara. There's also another primary character whose name was Sarah. There are a few scenes in which these two have a lot of screen time with Elliot, and I found that the rhyming was a bit off-putting. So, I changed Sarah's name to Rebecca, wanting to keep it biblical.

I relied on the ol' global search/replace of MS Word. It worked great! Except in the two instances where I had spelled Sarah's name as "Sara". She was Rebecca everywhere except in this one section of the book where she was Sara twice.

Thus commences a "nearing bedtime" scene the other night between daddy and daughter.

"Daddy?" asked my girl. "Who is Sara?"

"Sara?" I said. "There's no ... oh, crap."

Lesson? Don't rely on global/search and replace AND when searching for names, look for ALL spelling variations.

Even the best agents can struggle.

This truly blows my mind, but is an indication of the publishing industry. There's this author I know through WDC - she's literally one of the first folks I interacted with and pointed me in a number of good directions. She writes awesome, and I mean truly fantastic science fiction, both novels & short stories. She's had her shorts published in real print magazines. She has a following of sorts as well.

This awesome writer got signed by a very well known, well respected, big time New York agent.

It's been two and a half years, and no interest from any publishers.

Can you believe it? All I can say is.... Damn.

You spend years trying to get an agent, and then the economy just plain tanks. The big houses are being incredibly selective. At BEA this year, word was many houses are looking for so-called can't miss books. Celebrity-penned books are in with big advances. Of course, when are they never in?

I think I'm going to start looking at the smaller publishers.

By the way, if you're still curious about the difference between YA & Middle Grade, here's another good link. But, I love this one on Literary Lab, courtesy of Tess Hilmo.

Know your genre

I received a form letter email rejection today from an Jessica Regel. Mind you, I thought this had the potential to be a reach. She is cool with fantasy if it's YA/Middle Grade, however, she seems to prefer Contemporary Fantasy versus other forms of the genre. She likes her stories rooted in our world. While I like to think of The Children of Midian as contemporary fantasy, our world plays a role only initially until Elliot stumbles through a portal into the parallel world Midian. So, technically it's High Fantasy.

The classification of stories into genres is a topic, which I imagine both frustrates and challenges writers to pigeonhole their stories. I once had a short story rejected by a magazine because it was too sci-fi for them. This was in my very early and naive days of writing and trying to get published. I had honestly never thought of my short-story-on-the-verge-of-novella in terms genre. It took place here on earth with regular people, only the planet turned out to be a computer simulation that needed rebooting periodically. In retrospect, I suppose it was sci-fi.

I've gone to three writing conferences over the last three years and I've learned two often contradictory lessons.

1. If you want to get published you might want to know in which hole to stuff your pigeon of a story.
   
2. The story and good writing is what's important. So, just send it.

The problem with #1 is that, like most things in this world, not everything is black and white. It is often difficult to typecast a novel into one tidy little spot, plus that tiger actually grows new spots over time, and his old ones have to shift around to make room. Make sure you get it right and make sure what you query with matches what you say it is. Don't bother sending a query about your urban fantasy to an agent who is looking for that genre, and then include a synopsis in which a farm boy rides a dragon as it does battle with a Krakken in the North Sea. She might notice.

As for #2, well, not everyone agrees with it. Secondly, someone has to actually read a few of your chapters to get a feel for the quality of the story and the writing. In many cases, you need to get past the query and onto a partial for this rule to apply. If you make an unbelievable pitch in your query, you've at least piqued their interest, and it's also a good sign of your writing skills, or at least your sales skills. :-)

This of course goes beyond genre or literary category. If you write books for kids - well you've got numerous categories there - Middle Grade, Young Adult, chapter books, transition books, and so on. There is even rumor of a new category that is somewhere between Middle Grade and Young Adult. You see? A new spot on the tiger forcing the other spots to get out of the way!