Another great coffeehouse! Since it’s December, we had a bit of a holiday pot-luck: people brought EggNog (spiked and not-spiked), cookies, candy canes, and wine. They also collected Toys for Tots, and even lit the first two candles of a menorah in honor of the first night (upcoming) of Hanukkah.
Lots of people had just wrapped up NaNoWriMo, so there was a lot of good news to go around. Biggest news was probably Henry Herz getting published in Highlights for Children, which is (apparently) a wickedly hard market to crack.
My notes are below. Congrats to Henry and all the NaNoWriMo winners! And, as always, many thanks to Mysterious Galaxy for hosting us, and Jonathan Maberry for running the Coffeehouse!
- the one golden rule: no writer bashing; like or dislike the twilight books or da vinci code, but they opened doors for thousands of other writers and injected billions into the books industry
- san diego writer's festival: april 13th, central library, similar folks to the festival of books
- option prices have dropped a lot since the recession; standard is now $5K, but can include lots of extras, like five-star treatment to get to set, executive producer credit (paycheck per episode), royalties per tv episode, etc
- remember that your agent is a business partner; don't be afraid to contact them, but don't think they're your best friends, they work for you, and you can learn a lot from them; agents love writers that are business savvy
- nov and dec used to be a bad time for agents, but since it's the slow season, it's a good time to submit to them; ditto pitches to editors of magazines for articles to write
- "we're looking for original stories, not original submission practices"
- when selling anthology to publisher, need a few big names on there so they feel that it'll definitely sell
- maberry: budgets 10 min out of every hour for social media; has a lot of pages and has to manage them, and manage his time on them
- henry herz: got article accepted into highlights magazine! very hard market to crack
- january coffeehouse will be about pitching; will also do sample panel
- on a panel: they're looking for a celebrity, need people to be a little larger-than-life; sometimes audience will ask questions they know the answers to, just to hear a celebrity say it
- being a panelist is a skill; you need to be a slightly different version of yourself that the public will accept as "writer"
- neil gaiman is naturally very awkward; had to hire an acting coach to script out appearances so people will get to see the "neil gaiman" they come to see
- pitching, being on a panel, these are all skills you need to practice, but they *are* skills you can develop and improve, even if you're a complete introvert
- exercise: pick your favorite novel (or movie), and pitch it as if you wrote it; something you know well enough to do without notes
- need to be good at it and comfortable with friends so that when in front of agents you aren't so scared and vulnerable
- people are more comfortable with peers than with people that put them on a pedestal
- recommends using donald maas' workbook on writing the breakout novel; the way it's intended is after a first draft is done, makes you drill deeper into the book
- also: don't revise until after you've waited a month and then also read the whole thing through again
- finally: do revising in waves; handle one change at a time, to make them manageable
- unsure whether to make book a mystery or fantasy? write the book you'd have the most fun writing; if unsure of audience, pick the one you'd have fun writing for and go all in
