Literary agents and publishers reject an overwhelmingly large number of query letters than they accept. With those odds, it’s hard not to have gone through the rejection and dejection phase. In many cases, it’s not even an outright rejection of the query letter through a template responses. It’s that eerie silence from the other side … Read more
Most authors who have a novel or non-fiction book ready for submission, start the query letter process by listing out the traditional publishing houses – Penguin, HarperCollins, Hachette, John Wiley, Simon & Schuster Random House, you know the list. But for many authors, it’s like trying to swim against the current and it can take … Read more
Query letters for books need a lot of TLC (tender love & care) to create. Getting the mailing list of the best literary agents and publishers to send your carefully crafted query letter takes longer. Waiting for the publishers and the book agents takes forever. So no matter how determined you are in wanting to … Read more
In India, many leading publishers directly accept submissions from authors. They might work with literary agencies too, but that pipeline of manuscripts is hardly sufficient to keep their wheels turning throughout the year. So they open up the doors to first time authors even if it means investing more resources to evaluate the avalanche of … Read more
I wrote several hundred query letters and sent them to a whole lot of literary agents and publishers. ‘Several hundred’ refers more to the variations of a basic format, rather than hundred distinctly different formats. It was more of an experimentation and fine-tuning process where I made minor alterations after every few submissions. One of … Read more
So you’ve decided not to venture into the world of self-publishing yet. That brings you back to the process of wooing publishers or literary agents to represent you. If you are aiming for the traditional publishers, chances are they would want you to get a literary agency to review your manuscript first and then forward … Read more
Whether you are a fiction or non-fiction writer, it helps to understand the entire life cycle for a book. If you are just getting started, here’s a short primer to set the ball rolling. Writing the book Your writing will fall under two broad categories – fiction and non-fiction. In a novel (another label for … Read more