The Pitch!

Sometimes it feels like this whole publishing endeavor moves at about the pace of a snail crawling through a vat of molasses. A snail on muscle relaxers ever so slowly inching his way through slushy molasses mixed with quicksand. That slow. But I have good news! We are making progress! Achingly slow progress ... but progress nonetheless!

After three rounds of edits with my agent (one major round, one minor round, and one round of easy little tweaks, all of which made my manuscript stronger and more polished than it was), she started sending out pitch letters to editors last week. Agents usually send these out in batches as opposed to ALL THE EDITORS at once for many reasons. Some editors don't want multiple submissions (to see your manuscript if others are looking at it at the same time). Some want an "exclusive." Some editors don't like when you pitch to multiple editors at the same publisher. But I think the most important reason is probably that agents don't want to blanket the entire publishing world at once in case editors have valuable feedback about what still might need to be tweaked. The agent may need to go back to the author for more revisions and they want a fresh batch of editors to approach on round two. It's the whole "don't put all your eggs in one basket" kind of thing.

Anyway, my agent sent her pitch letter for Zenn Diagram out to 14 editors and -- joy of joys -- got 8 positive responses so far! That is WAY more than I expected, frankly, and I'm thrilled! So now I assume my agent will send them the manuscript and they will read it and decide if they like it enough to take it back to the publishing powers that be to fight for it and, hopefully, eventually make some kind of offer. Obviously the more editors reading, the better my chances. The best case scenario is that several editors all want it and they get into a bit of a bidding war. But ... I'm not holding my breath for that. At this point I'll just be happy if ANYONE likes it enough to pay me any sort of money at all.

Again, since I've never been this far in the process before, I'm not exactly sure what is next, or how quickly this process will go, but I'll keep you updated. Hoping for some wonderful news in 2016!!! Thanks to all of you for following my publishing journey, and happy holidays!