Graham Storrs

Today, May 4th, is the second anniversary of the commencement of this blog. I started it on my return from a writer’s retreat which I credit for kick-starting my career as a published author. So this anniversary is my day for taking stock of how all that is going. Here is what I wrote in [...]

The other day, someone in my online writers group wondered if a particular publisher was still in business. They had submitted a manuscript to them four months ago and had heard nothing. So they’d checked the website and found it hadn’t been updated since some time in 2008. Of course, old hands at the submissions [...]

I ran the complete set of posts from this blog through the Wordle program. Wordle calculates word frequencies, translates them to physical sizes, and uses this information to lay out the most frequent words in interesting ways. The image below, therefore, shows you just what I talk about most in this blog. If you haven’t [...]

I knew it would be good when I saw their promo site, but How Not to Write a Novel: 200 Mistakes to Avoid at All Costs if You Ever Want to Get Published by Sandra Newman and Howard Mittelmark, exceeded my every expectation. I thought it would be funny and it was. I laughed out [...]

Be still my beating heart! I just got a letter today from the JABberwocky Agency in New York in reply to my query letter. It asked to see some pages! Maybe I’m getting the hang of this query-letter thing after all. JABberwocky is a great agency, and the agent I approached, Eddie Schneider, looks like [...]

I recently finished writing (yet another) novel and I’m looking for an agent to represent it. To get an agent (it seems) you have to ‘query’ them. That is, you have to write them a letter asking them if they would be interested in reading your manuscript. Easy enough, you’d think, but writing a query [...]