Rules for accepting this award:
1. Thank the person who gave you the award and link back to them.
2. Nominate up to five others for the award.
3. Let them know via comment on their blog.
4. Post the award on your blog.
I like the idea of awarding this honor to 5 people who have less than 200 followers on their blog. So! If you know someone who fits that criteria and deserves a shout out, I'm leaving it up to YOU to nominate them in the comments below. I will treat these on a first come first served basis, as well. So hurry and get your nominations in!
On the internship front... this is my last week with the Agency in NYC. I am so grateful for the experience I have had there these past two months. I think that the Agent would have kept working with me forever if I had let her... but I'm not necessarily in it for the long term yet. I'm still trying to figure out my path. I have read so many queries now... and I can tell you what mine WON'T look like... I have seen how to professionally submit a manuscript for review... and I have seen that even if your novel is really amazing it's not always likely to get picked up by a particular agent.
Everything I have learned so far will, I hope, make me a better writer in the long run. We'll see.
I'm leaving the internship with the Agency after only two months, though, because I have landed ANOTHER internship... with a publishing house satellite office only 30 minutes from my home (instead of a one and a half hour train ride). I'm excited because here's a new angle of the publishing industry I have not seen yet! I'm headed from the agent's world into the publisher's world! By the time I am done interning my resume will be thick with experience!
The next challenge is what to do with all that experience.
I have one more response request. A couple of you mentioned wanting to know more about my experience the past couple of months at the Agency. There's a blog post here, that I think sums up a lot of what I have learned, but I'd like to open the floor for questions. Please ask me questions regarding the internship and I will compile and answer them in a post next week!
I'm looking forward to hearing from you!
Questions? Oh yeah, I'm full of questions.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to just make the worlds biggest comment here because I really have so many.
The first, I know tons of people who say things like: "Why did this book ever get published? The characters are terrible, the language is sad, and the plot could use some help." I've always assumed that books like that made it through because of the personal preference thing: how much of that did you see? Did you ever pick out a manuscript and basically get laughed down? Or was everything you liked also liked by the agent/s?
How important is the query letter? Is a good query letter really going to make it, or is it all about the pages? Did the agency you working with go to pages even when the query wasn't that great?
Statistics, I'm sure everyone wants to know the stats: How many queries a week, how many requested manuscripts, etc.
I know that I'm not the only one who wants to know: what made the stand out manuscripts stand out? I know this has been answered a million times, but so often the only thing people will say is "Voice," but we've all seen plenty of manuscripts with killer voice but unenthusiastic everything else (from concept to dialogue). What did you notice about the manuscripts?
Did any new clients get signed while you were there?
Did you get to work on any existing clients' work? How did that go? Specifically, did you get to read any of the already signed clients' first drafts? and how did those compare to the manuscripts in the slush? What I'm trying to get at here is, in your opinion, did most of the manuscripts in the slush suffer from first-draft-to-query-itis? Would most of the manuscripts in the slush have benefited from some word smithing? Or were they doomed by concept?
You know what, I think I'll stop there, but I could sure keep going.
Rena! Thanks for the questions! I will definitely answer these!
ReplyDeletecongrats on your new gig!! the shorter commute sounds like a dream :)
ReplyDeleteOOh yes congratulations!!! That must be so cool!! I really want to get an internship with an agency when I'm old enough :)
ReplyDeleteAnd I think Matt over at Matt's Writing Lair ( http://mattswritinglair.blogspot.com/ ) should get an award. Just a suggestion! He needs some more followers!