ozma914 | Entries tagged with agent

See that little play on words I did with the title? No? Never mind.

I finished the final polishing of We Love Trouble. It tops out at 81,000 words--still the longest novel I've written yet. Boy, is writing a mystery tough: characters, suspects, clues, red herrings, ghosts, horses, Bigfoot ...

Well, it's that kind of story.

I already have Beowulf: In Harm's Way, Fire On Mist Creek, and Summer Jobs Are Murder at various points in the submission process, and I think I'll send this one out on the literary agent hunt. I really like it ... which doesn't mean it's good, of course, but if readers have half as much fun reading it as I did writing it, it should do pretty well.

I've described We Love Trouble as "The Thin Man meets Scooby Doo". For those of you who don't remember "The Thin Man", I could also describe it as "Hart to Hart Meets Scooby Doo". For those who don't remember "Hart to Hart", I'm at something of a loss. I assume everyone has heard of Scooby Doo.

I finished a submission cover letter, and here's one of the blurbs I came up with:

A near collision with a riderless horse leads travel bloggers Travis and Victoria Noble to an unconscious teenager—then to a dead man. A quiet Indiana camping trip for the Suzuki twins and their steeds has become a conspiracy involving horse racing, blackmail, and … morel mushrooms.

It's another fun mystery for the always helpful Nobles, who are so used to being suspects they have bail money on speed dial. Not so for their dog Wulfgar, whose unusual talents include seeing dead people. He struggles to protect his humans and pass on what the ghosts tell him: Something's unusual about the twins' horses, and the threat to the Suzuki family—and the Nobles—is far more than supernatural.

Yeah, I'd read that. Well, I already have, about a dozen times.

"Did you say dog?"

http://markrhunter.com/
https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

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As you all know from my incessant harping about it, I have some major publishing news to announce first on my newsletter—as soon as I have ten new people sign up for the newsletter, which hasn’t been active much up until now. (The signup is over at www.markrhunter.com.) We’re about halfway there.

Because I’m comfortable with how things are progressing on new projects, I thought I could take some time and go the traditional route with some other works. With my YA mystery Red Is For Ick and my SF novel, Beowulf: In Harm’s Way, I decided to take up the slow, laborious, and often fruitless process of searching for a literary agent.

The good news is that most agents are okay with an author submitting to more than one of them at a time, which speeds up the process. (But only a little, because I take the time to research agents in my search for the right match.) The bad news is that at any one time, there are about two billion agentless authors for every agent who’s looking for a new client. Maybe three billion.

Anyway, once I exhaust all the agents who might make for a good partnership, I planned to go direct to those traditional publishers that accept unagented submissions. Then I would consider independent publishing. Thinking that far ahead shows that my confidence in the traditional publishing process has eroded over the years.

The steps of publishing are measured in weeks—best case scenario. More likely months. Once an author sells a completed manuscript, it’s still often years before it comes out in print. So earlier this week I sent out some queries, along with outlines and sample pages, then moved on to other writing work. No sense waiting by the virtual mailbox.

Within less than 24 hours I got a request for a full manuscript.

I told you that whole story just to show how rare this is. It’s also by no means a guarantee of representation. I’ve received requests for fulls before: Only once did it lead to me getting an agent, years ago, and that didn’t work out. Statistically speaking, I might be no more likely to sign with this agent than the Cubs are to get into the World Series.

But stranger things have happened.

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Feeling that I’m not balancing enough in my life, I’ve sent a query and sample chapters of my YA humor/mystery novel, Red Is For Ick, to an agent. That makes six works I’ve got out making the rounds – three novels and three short stories – assuming one doesn’t come back by the time you read this.

Of course, only one – The Notorious Ian Grant – is actually sold. The rest are simply submissions, one after a request for edits and the other four in slush pile purgatory. Still, one thing I’ve heard often remains true in today’s publishing world: The reason most manuscripts are never published is because they’re not finished and sent out.

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Slightly Off the Mark

Why We Love Trouble is a mystery

An Agent of Progress

Secret Agent, Man

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