Adrienne Kerr is the senior editor for commercial fiction at Penguin Canada. She’s worked in various book-oriented occupations for seventeen years (gosh, she must have started as a kid).
Adrienne ran the session alone and we had a fabulous time.
Here are my notes:
- Everyone has to hustle.
- Harness your enthusiasm.
- Craft your query as carefully as you craft your novel.
- Find out what your target agent or editor has sold or acquired recently.
Research
- Writers have the power. Act like it.
- Start with your bookshelves. Pick out your favourite books. Look at the acknowledgements. Authors always thank their agents and editors.
- Next, go to your library or bookstore and do the same thing.
- Then go on line. Look at the agencies. Look at the submission guidelines. Anything less than 100% compliance is a waste of everyone’s time.
- Be open to the process; be delightful to work with.
- Editors are hidden. They’re not on-line. Traditionally, they don’t take unsolicited submissions. Now, they’re taking a more active role in ferreting out new talent.
- Check out Publishers’ Marketplace. Search through 14 years worth of deals. Each entry has a logline attached.
Loglines – you need one
- What if – so what formula
25 words or less. Convey major conflict.
Answers so what. - Hollywood style
It’s X meets Y.
Mash-up of famous books and/or movies. - Save the Cat method
A sentence or two, ironic, compelling, genre/audience-targeted, killer title. - Blurb-based
Who/what the hero wants and why.
Focus on conflict. - Comps must be realistic. Consider the sales numbers and the social media imprint.
- Indicate your job only if pertinent (e.g. a lawyer who writes legal thrillers).
- Agents will use your query/logline/synopsis to sell.
- Editors will use your query/logline/synopsis for marketing.
- You will use it when someone asks what your book is about.
The rest of the session was spent critiquing loglines and queries volunteered from the attendees. I was still working on mine and didn’t speak up, but there were some pretty interesting projects pitched and some effective improvements were crowd-sourced.
I will be finishing off my SiWC posts one per day.
Until tomorrow, mes amis!
Thank you for sharing all the info you gathered this past week. Lots of good stuff here from the agent. I particularly loved reading, “Writers have the power. Act like it.” Many times I forget that part.
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Glad my frantic note-taking has been useful 🙂
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Awesome post, Mel! When I get around to querying again I’ll have to come back to it! 🙂
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Just passing along the good stuff I got from SiWC 😉 Glad you liked it.
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