My journey as an author continued:
Please read part 1 on my author history page.
When I finished writing the first Elven Quest Series book, I
knew it was not really done. I had an entirely new set of adventures and a
conclusion that I wanted to write but I didn’t want the first story to sit
unread while I wrote it. I paid to have the manuscript printed and I took it to
my mother in law and asked her if she would edit it for me. She agreed and I
went back to writing the second novel.(Pic below of my original manuscript.)
About a year and a half later the second novel was also
finished and my first novel was edited. I started making the changes that my
mother in law suggested. It was an arduous project and even after I made the
changes I was not sure it was the best it could be. I sent it to others to gain
their opinions and received some good feedback. I made more changes. Then I
created a query letter and started researching agents and publishers to send it
to. I sent the query letter via email to about a dozen agents/publishers. During
all this time I was continually going through it again and again making changes.
Then one amazing day I was at my day job and I received a
phone call. It was a woman from a small publishing agency named Kathie McGuire.
She was very nice and we had an in-depth discussion about writing and marketing
novels. She told me that she thought my manuscript had great promise but that
it was too long and slow especially in the beginning. She suggested re-working
it and focusing on what was necessary to keep. She told me to try to cut out
some of the repetitiveness and the obvious details. She said, “readers are
smart even children, you need to remember to leave some things up to them to
imagine.” Then she asked about the ending and asked if I had left it on a
cliffhanger because it was obvious to her that this was a series not just one
book. I answered yes, that that was the case and she told me to change this.
“If you look at the Harry Potter books for example,” she said, “All of them end
in such a way that the main character accomplishes something major. There is a
clear ending so that they could be just stand alone books. This way the reader
does not feel let down that they read all the way to the end and do not see a
resolution.” What she said made complete sense and I knew as soon as she
mentioned Harry Potter that I liked her. She told me she was going to reject
the manuscript for now but that she really wanted me to think about making the
changes that she suggested and taking some time to have some more people, especially
people in my target audience read it and give their feedback. Then she told me
that in the future, if I wanted to, I could re-submit it to her.
I was disappointed of course that she did not want to accept
it right then, but was so pleased that she had taken the time to call me and
discuss it rather than simply sending an email saying this is not the right
project for us, like so many others had. I did exactly as Kathie suggested over
the next year. I was stern with myself about cutting a lot of the script. Once
I thought it was finished I sent it to my siblings. My brother’s daughter was
ten at the time and I asked him to read it with her so that they could both
tell me what they thought, as her age group was my target audience. Luckily for
me I have a very supportive family. They both read it and gave me excellent
feedback about specific parts that I could add or take things away that would
make it more exciting. My brother and niece liked it so much they asked if they
could read the second one so they could see how it ended so I sent them that
one as well.
I felt re-energized about the book and proud of it. I went
back through and made some creative changes. I drafted another letter to Kathie
McGuire explaining the changes that I had made and saying that I knew that this
version was the best that the manuscript had ever been and was much more
marketable for my target audience. I asked her to please take a second look and
that it was because of her taking the time to call me and discuss the manuscript
that I had made the changes. I was so happy when she wrote back and asked me to
send the first 50 pages. Then within a month she wrote again asking me to send
the entire manuscript. I was elated and held a hopeful, butterfly feeling in my
stomach that she would like it. Please read the rest in the conclusion blog….
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