As I wrote a few days back, my first query in more than a year is going to this excellent imprint but I wanted to make sure my cover letter was guaranteed to catch an editor’s eye. Fortunately, my good friend Lorraine is both an excellent writer and well acquainted with the query process. Among all my writer friends, she is the first to get back to me with suggested edits and has been a massive supporter of my writing from the moment I started bringing my novel to the Sunday Central Phoenix Writing Workshop and was usually on point with her edits and recommendations.
My novel got workshopped massively for over four years and
there was a period where I ran my work through group at Sunday, Tuesday,
Wednesday, and Thursday CPWW meetings. That went down to Sundays and Tuesdays
after we went into lockdown and had to meet via Zoom. It was a process that I’d
recommend to any writer attempting to become better at their craft. It’s like
having beta readers in the trenches with you to help clean up your prose.
Lorraine was sweet with her critique of my cover letter:
I am not telling you this to discourage- but so that you know it is not your writing of the book giving pause. It is the cost. Plain and simple. But... it is possible an eBook publisher might be more than willing. I have seen that lately. Offers to eBook a larger book- but not do a print until so many have sold, and the book is selling well.
She was being honest about the sell of a 189k-word book, it’s
always been an issue of mine. A good editor might be able to help me pare back
some of the narrative, or help me fashion a coherent duology—it’s a river I’ll
have to cross, one not forded easily—not anything to get my book
published but willing to listen to a seasoned editor and cut a baby from the
novel’s belly. Maybe release a director’s cut after all is said and done.
LMAO, Word put little blue dots under what it couldn’t see as two separate phrases and when I right-clicked on it, just said, “conciseness.” Oh, the burden I bare…
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