what am I doing wrong???

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Kaylee

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I have so many rejections that to keep from setting down and crying, I put denial instead of rejection. I am a newbie to writing and I confess I don't know what I am doing. I had my neice who is a english teacher help me with the query letters.
But I really don't know what agency to send it to, because it would fit in different catagories. It may be to weird and off beat for some, who do I turn to for help. I am a nervous wreck here, it took a year and a half to right the novel.
Can somebody help me? What am I doing wrong?
 

Calla Lily

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Try posting your query in SYW. There are a lot of helpful people there.

Warning: SYW tells it like it is. You need a thick skin to post there. But the people who crit there are great. Good luck!
 

Toothpaste

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Though it may feel absurdly frustrating, there is some good news to all this. You are getting rejections (at least it seems from your post, I may be wrong) on your query letter alone. That is actually good because it means there is something wrong with your letter. Which is easy to fix (though time consuming and a bit maddening). At least your book itself is not being rejected because that is a whole new set of issues.

So. Let's talk. First off what genres do you see your book fitting into (and don't worry about being "too weird and off beat", there is an agent for every genre, from the very typical to the truly bizarre. Some authors think they are too "out there", but really, if you read some of the stuff on the shelf, there is no "out there". Because "out there" gets published all the time, which I guess makes it more. . . "out here"?)? Second, what is your word count? Third, and probably most importantly, if you are ready for some real tell it like it is advice, no holds barred . . . post your query in the query section of the Share Your Work forum. The forum is easily found, just scroll down the main page. The password is "vista".

We can fix this! Go team!
 

Susan Breen

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You've got lots of good advice already, so I'll just say welcome to AW and good luck. It's a long road and it's nice to have company.
 

Kaylee

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I see my book fitting in the christain bibilcal genre. The world being destroyed by nuclear bombs, what ever genre that would be under, And with all that chaos still humorus, and also way off beat, and more or less a fanasy world. It has 236, 735 word count and it is my baby. Thank ya'll for your help, I will check out share your work forum.
 

Deepspirit

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I don't know if you mention the word count in your query letters or not but IMHO, the book is too long and many agents don't approve this.
 

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Kaylee, so we have a few problems on the surface, some which are now unfortunately harder to solve than the query letter (which I would still advise you to post).

Your greatest obstacle is your word count. There is simply no way you will get an agent with a book that long. Heck anything over 120 000 is considered way too long let alone into the 200k's. There are the rarest of rare examples of a first time author getting published with a first novel this long, but they are so rare that I fear even mentioning it here as a means of giving you hope. Honestly, hon, it's just too long.

Next your genre. This is a big deal because the Christian market is a very different market from mainstream. If your book deals in Christian themes, and the moral is something like the goodness of god, or bringing god into your life etc, then no matter what else your story may be, it is Christian fiction, possible you can call it a humorous Christian fantasy. However if your book is more of an allegory of a biblical tale that is not an obvious message story to people about the Christian faith, if it uses tried and tested tales in that regard, the apocalypse and how humans handle it, vs the apocalypse and how the righteous are rewarded and the sinners punished, then you may have a humorous fantasy on your hands, possibly satirical (I'm not sure what kind of humour you are using, you didn't specify)?

But truly, your biggest obstacle is your word count. I also worry that you refer to your book as your baby. Certainly books we write are near and dear to us, but we also have to be brutal with them, tear them to shreds, get rid of characters we adore . . . we have to be pragmatic as authors as well. We can't cradle our books and protect them as if they are living things. They aren't. They are words on a page telling a story in the best way you can. And sometimes we can't always see the best way and it takes someone else telling us what we have to do to fix it.

One of the biggest mistakes first time authors make is writing too much. Believe it or not the mark of a professional is someone who can be concise, clear, and still keep poetry in the text. The more you cut out of your book I am sure you will find the tighter, the better, the more like a "real book" it will be. I come from personal experience. I had a novel at 97 000 words and was told to cut 10 000 (nothing compared to the edits you have to do, but as far as a ratio goes, it was still considerable). I did it, and not by cutting a single scene, but rather paragraphs, even individual words. And the final result, well people couldn't actually tell what I had cut, they only knew that the work read so much better, was so much stronger.

Not nice to hear, but it is the truth. You really are going to have to cut that story of yours down to a manageable size. If possible you could make it into two books, providing they can also stand on their own. But without even reading your query, I know the problem, at least one of them, and this is it.

So it is time to take a long hard look at your baby. And bring out the scissors.
 
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Mr. Anonymous

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Therein lies a major problem. It is highly unlikely that such a large book will be published, especially from an unestablished author.

To put it simply, it would cost too much to produce.

I recommend splitting the book into two or three.

Secondly, I would like to mention that (and I may be very much wrong in this assumption, please do not take offense) with such a large book to cope with I figure it was probably very difficult for you to revise and edit. A colossal task even with a substantially shorter work, to be sure.

Would you be willing to share with us how many times you have revised?

So my recommendation is to split your opus up, and then take the first part of it and really refine it. If you don't trust yourself, get your English teacher niece to read through it. Consider asking for a beta reader (you can do so right here on AbsoluteWrite.) Once that's done, go back out with a different title and a GREAT query (which Query Hell in Share Your Work can help you with).

EDIT: Toothpaste, you beat me to it. xP
 

Phaeal

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Please do put a sample of the novel (the first chapter) on SYW. That's the only way we can tell what work the story itself may take.

I don't think there's any use in querying a first novel this long. It needs serious reduction and polishing before you think of marketing it.
 

Kaylee

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I am taking your advice and I am going to cut the book up into three books. I'll be getting back to you, thank you again for all your help.
 

MelancholyMan

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There are two parts to your problem in addition to length. One their fault, one your fault.

1) There is no system. Agents are not sitting around waiting for new work to fall in their lap. Their websites might make it seem like that but it simply isn't the case. Getting published is infinitely more difficult than writing the book and requires an entirely different set of skills. It is as much luck as anything else - though there are those here who would disagree.

2)
... I am a nervous wreck here, it took a year and a half to right the novel.

If you are making mistakes like this in your manuscript or query letters it is not doing you any good.

This business is hard as hell and you have to be tough as nails to survive it. I'm not that tough yet. Not even close.
 
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dgiharris

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Don't mean to jump on the dog pile here, just trying to help. Realize there are two kinds of people who ask for help.

Type 1 only wants to hear help that will enable them to do what they were planning on doing anyways

Type 2 wants help that will enable them to reach their goal and their willing to do ANYTHING to reach their goal.

I'm hoping you are type 2. We get a lot of type 1's that come in here, post, hear something counter to what they wanted to do, then leave.

But in the case that you are type 2, this is exactly what you need to do to get that book published!

1) The absolute BEST and I Do mean BEST thing you can do is to play around with this website. Jump in and out of the threads and you SIMPLY MUST Read the Uncle Jim's Thread. It will shave YEARS off of your learning curve. Read to Post #200, if you don't see the value by then, then I don't know what to say. I've been reading the thread off and on (30 minutes per week) for the past year, I'm on post # 2200. If you focused, you could get through it in a month easy.

http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6710

2) You simply must post your chp 1 and chp 2 on this site (SYW) sounds like you may have to try a couple of different genres.

3) Buy a copy of the Elements of Style by Strunk and White, and read it once per year.

4) Keep writing and LEARNING about writing. If you haven't read at least two "How to write" books then odds are you are making a lot of fundamental mistakes

5) Be an active member on this site, posting, critiquing, reading others critiques, reading threads in the forum. This site is a gold mine. I never would have gotten published without it.

Good luck

Mel...
 

arkady

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[...]
1) There is no system. Agents are not sitting around waiting for new work to fall in their lap. Their websites might make it seem like that but it simply isn't the case. Getting published is infinitely more difficult than writing the book and requires an entirely different set of skills. It is as much luck as anything else -- though there are those here who would disagree.

Not me. I think you've put it very well, MM.
 

JenWriter

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I disagree as well. While I agree that agents aren't waiting for a book to "fall into their laps", they are looking for good books and finding an agent who does love your novel is not dependent on luck. One part hard work, one part dedication, one part good premise, one part excellent writing and one part luck. Just like anything in life, luck does have something to do with it, but I believe hard work and dedication play a much bigger role.
 

Bubastes

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There are two parts to your problem in addition to length. One their fault, one your fault.

1) There is no system. Agents are not sitting around waiting for new work to fall in their lap.

They're waiting for GOOD new work to fall in their laps. Yes, there is some luck involved, but writers who have a darn good story have better luck (go figure).

By the way, has anyone read this book? It's worth checking out to gain a better understanding of what to do and what to avoid during the submission process:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0143035657/?tag=absolutewritedm-20
 

shadrake

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I disagree as well. While I agree that agents aren't waiting for a book to "fall into their laps", they are looking for good books and finding an agent who does love your novel is not dependent on luck.
Hi Jen. You are basically correct except agents are looking for books they can sell... It is a business. They might like a submission, may even love it, but if they cannot sell it on then they won't take it. Luck is a factor when you consider some agents get 100 queries a day to wade through. If the first 5 queries an agent reads one day are abusive or ignorant and you are #6, it may be dismissed out of hand because they are having a bad day to that point. Agents are human beings and luck does play a role.
 
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