So much for not focusing on my writing this month. By restricting myself from not working on my next book, I made myself focus on the blog. I am actively trying to get more followers on my blog. I googled my own name and my blog title. Nothing came up, which makes getting followers pretty hard. One of my obsessions during my non-writing month was to figure out how to get more traffic to my blog. I found a very helpful article to help me make my blog more search-engine friendly. After using the skills I learned in this article, I googled my name and then the title of my blog again. Both times I found it on the first page. This was a proud moment for me since I am not computer-savvy at all!
My next obsession for my non-writing month was searching for agents I can query in March. And when writers find agents we want to query, we don’t just send them a query. We research them. We start off by going to their websites, then their blogs and any interviews they have done. We also look up who they represent and what deals they have made. This ensures we are querying the right agent to possibly represent our book. We check out any books, articles and websites that these agents have ever mentioned in an interview or on their blogs. We even obsess over their tweets to try to read their personality. We take a lot of time preparing for the query process. We have all done numerous drafts of our manuscript, knowing we could keep revising but forcing ourselves to put it down instead. Then we agonize over our query letters and synopses, knowing if these aren’t amazing, there is no chance of an agent seeing our manuscript (that we just know they will love if only they have a chance to read it). All of this effort makes getting that rejection a million times worse. It’s not just a no; it makes us question everything, we try not to take it personal. To think we put all that time in and we get a form R! But we will continue to do this, because there is an agent out there that will love our work almost as much as we do. More to come on this process next month.
Here are some writer articles that I have come across this month. Check them out.
YA Fantasy Guide (this entire website is helpful)
Casey L McCormick - The Call (I pray I need to use this one day)
Writers Digest Conference (official notes from NYC – see what I learned)
Hope the links help my fellow writers. To my non writers I hope you gain some insight on the process.
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