~~~Lara Zielin~~~

So, here’s the scoop. I totally got an agent. And a book deal. And I was going to start a whole new blog about what it’s like being a writer, now that those two things are in place, but I thought that the posts I’ve put here, to date, are really important. The process of getting to this place is as valuable as arriving. So I’m going to keep the posts and just update from here.

So, um, I GOT A BOOK DEAL!!! OMG, OMG, OMG.

Here’s wha hoppened:

During my November (2006) trip to New York and to the Backspace Writers Conference, Susanna Einstein of LJK Literary was gracious enough to meet with me over lunch and discuss my two books, DONUT DAYS and THE DISAPPEARED (see previous posts). She pointed out the problems with each of them, which were numerous and varied and … significant. I’m just being real here because I want every writer to know that just because a book has problems doesn’t mean it’s not fixable or that you can’t overcome said issues.

Ahem. Anyway, I asked her if she would re-read the books if I fixed the problems and she said yes. This was totally and completely gracious of Susanna and, if I were her, I might have kicked my butt to the roadside by this point, but for whatever reason, Susanna was willing to keep my number in her Rolodex — metaphorically speaking. I was lucky, lucky to have this occur, but I’d also networked my butt off to get to her. I’ve written a book about networking (shameless plug here) and I really believe in it. I’ve got a previous post about networking and I stand by my belief that connecting with people is as important as doing good work. Nuff said — I’ll get off my mini soapbox now.

I focused on fixing DONUT DAYS, which was the stronger of my two books IMHO. This took until late January. That might seem like a short time to many of you reading this, but please see my previous posts about jumping the gun and submitting works before they’re ready. It took everything I had to sit on my novel and make sure DONUT DAYS was strong enough before I sent it back to Susanna. Very soon, I will write a post about what was wrong with the book and what I had to fix. I think it might be valuable for some other writers out there.

I emailed Susanna the new text and she told me it could be six to eight weeks before she’d get to it, which was very understandable. She’d already read the stupid thing once. How could I expect her to move quickly on a new draft? Thing was, four days later she emailed me and said she wanted to represent it.

Eeeeeeee!!!!

So, my next post will be about the changes she requested and how we wound up selling it to Putnam. And all the good stuff about advances, etc. I hope this information might be helpful to writers trying to pursue that golden burrito in the sky: a published book.

More soon!

This entry was posted on Friday, June 1st, 2007 at 1:08 pm and is filed under agent, writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.