Agent? Are we supposed to have one of those? God, I am so crap at this. I think I did mail out some agent queries at some point, so I must have got some rejection letters. I don’t even know that I’ve met an agent, you know, in the flesh.
Long story short: If you want to know how I sold my book, keep reading. If you want to find an agent, probably you should read some of these other posts.
Basically, I went to Armadillocon 2009 Writer’s Workshop with a short story based on ‘Revolution World.’ I met some great people, got some valuable writing advice, and generally had a good time. Chris Roberson read my story and liked it. Over a couple of beers at the hotel bar, he offered to read my book and give me a critique. He’s a really great guy so he probably would have offered anyway, but without the beer, I probably wouldn’t have asked. He and all the other authors were talking about Worldcon because they’d all just come from that convention a few weeks before. They also talked about World Fantasy Convention because it was coming up in a few months.
Afterward, I shamelessly peppered Chris with questions about writing via email and he’s just too nice to ignore me. Chris said that he had an agent for a while, but found he did better on his own, primarily going to conventions and meeting with publishers and editors there. Now, that may only work for him because of who he is, but I’ve had other authors tell me the same thing.
A few weeks later, I finished my book and sent it over to Chris. He gave me some good edits to do and suggested I come out to World Fantasy Convention as that would be a great way to meet other writers and publishers and get an idea of how the publishing side of writing works. Traipsing off to California to drink beer and talk about books sounded like a great way to spend the weekend, so I convinced the spouse that it would be fun (and that the hotel bar would probably be airing football) and off we went. While I was there, Chris introduced me to Jeremy Lassen from Night Shade and told him about my book. Jeremy said it sounded cool and he’d take a look. I hung out with the Night Shade guys a little at their party. When we got back, Chris said he’d emailed them a copy of my book.
To be honest, Jeremy talked to so many people at WFC that I doubted he’d remember me at all. I didn’t hear back from them for a long time so I assumed that was the case, but about eleven months later, I had a contract in my inbox. I can’t say that’s a path to publishing that is repeatable, but it worked for me.
God knows what I am going to do next time. I am almost done with this YA book and I know Night Shade has zero interest in those. Guess I better read some of these other posts too!