Jacqueline Carey Quotes

It's hard for a newbie author to get noticed.

It used to be a lot easier to get a book deal.

Authors by the hundreds can tell you stories by the thousands of those rejection slips before they found a publisher who was willing to 'gamble' on an unknown.

Try to meet as many authors, agents, and editors as you can.

The only time I was ever approached to write a book was when I was most famous.

Of course I had a piece of luck I couldn't have imagine for myself in a million years: I got an agent. That sped up the process. I'd say it's a good idea, getting an agent.

There was one person who greatly and directly benefited my career--my agent Virginia Kidd. From 1968 to the late nineties she represented all my work, in every field except poetry. I could send her an utterly indescribable story, and she'd sell it to Playboy or the Harvard Law Review or Weird Tales or The New Yorker--she knew where to take it. She never told me what to write or not write, she never told me, That won't sell, and she never meddled with my prose.

Writing a good query letter has very little to do with writing a good novel. But if you can't write the one, it makes it really hard to get the other published.

Start writing the things that you are reading or that you want to be published doing.

I would very much like to become a best-selling author.

I have represented people in book deals.

I struggled for a long time to get anything published.

The trick was really finding the appropriate publisher for each of the projects I'd devised.

The best source for finding an agent is called Literary Agents of North America. It's a complete list of agents, not only by name and address, but by type of book they represent and by what their submission criteria are.

The usual way - through a long series of rejections, revising my manuscripts, and kept trying again and again. Finally I was fortunate enough to find a good agent.

I had the easiest publishing experience in the entire world. I sent out fifteen courier letters to agents, got five no replies, nine rejections and one I want to see it. A month later I had an agent. Another month later I had a three book deal with Little Brown.

Acquiring an aggressive, honest, and communicative agent with actual relationships in real-live New York publishing houses is, in my opinion, the single most important move that a writer who aspires to be successful can make.

Would you care to publish this? Sincerely, Robert B. Parker.

Don't do a hard sell or try to tell the agent that you're going to be a bestseller or the next John Grisham. This goes down very badly. If your work is good, then they are skilled enough to know this within a few pages.

Getting your work published is a major struggle.

I sold 'Hattie Big Sky' without an agent but quickly realized a writing career required an agent.

If you want to be traditionally published, then you most likely want to get a literary agent. To sign with an agent, you need to send them a query letter, but agents can get up to 20,000 query letters a year. With numbers like that, it helps to get in front of agents with every opportunity you have.

I love writing. I love to write, and I would eventually love to have some of my work produced.

When you start, the world of publishing seems like a great cathedral citadel of talent, resisting attempts to let you inside. It isn't like that at all. It may be more difficult now, and take longer than when I started to write, but there's a great, empty warehouse out there looking for simple talent.

Most writers want to share their essay or book much too quickly. Those who accept the pain of hard work and revising are those who get published.