A Newbie Who Has Been Here A Long Time :)

I'm a super long-time lurker (I used the forums here to research agents and it was a great source of info), but I'm hoping I can help someone the way other writers have helped me and advised me over the years.

I'm in my 20s, I've been writing and selling fiction for over a decade now, I have one published novel with a New York publisher, several books with independent publishers, and I'm currently working on a new novel.

I don't know if I'll actually be any help to anyone here, but I'd like to take some time each day to try to help someone if I can. We'll see if my years of experience actually amount to anything, I guess.

Thanks for the kind welcome, everyone! I don't know why I've waited this long to post, but I've been pointing friends and new writers toward this site for a long time. I think the more information writers have available to them about the art, craft, and business, the better!

Thanks again for the kind welcome. I guess should add, the areas I might be most helpful in are:

* query letters -- when I went looking for my agent, approximately 60 out of 120 queried (over a 9 month period) asked to see my manuscript. I think that's a pretty good success rate, but as you can guess from the 9 month part, it also meant a LOT of rejections (a lot of highs and lows that year!). One very respected agent told me it was the best query letter she had ever read -- and then she passed on the novel 24 hours later. So maybe I was only meant to write queries professionally.

Luckily, in the end, 3 agents loved the book the same week (two of them from my "top tier" who just happened to take forever to read the MS) and that ended up being a great experience. So if there's one thing I guess I can do, it's write a query letter and execute a submission plan.

I also, obviously, will be able to give some feedback on my experiences with a lot of different agents and how they handle submissions, which could come in handy in the Bewares and Background Check forum, I think.

* marketing -- over the last ten years, I've worked as a freelance marketer for small presses and various online ventures. I've also worked on a few projects for major New York publishers. One of these groups was not open to "outside the box" ideas. I'll let you guess which one.

* the editor's side of the business -- for five years, I read the slush pile for a fiction publication that receives 500 submissions a month, so I have a lot of thoughts on what authors are doing right and wrong during that process.

* my experiences with my first novel -- the publisher was well-known in New York, but not one of the huge conglomerates.

* my experiences working with my agent

So hopefully I can be of help to someone. Please understand that I'm a BIG nobody, and anything I post is just my opinion, but I've been around the block a few times and I like to believe that maybe someone else will be able to learn from my many mistakes.