What I learned at the Muse & Marketplace Conference for Writers
What I learned at this year’s Muse & Marketplace, Grub Street’s National Conference for Writers:
- “Brevity is not the soul of a good pitch.” You need to give magazine editors enough information to help them decide if your story, essay, or op-ed is a good fit for their publication (Adam McGee, managing editor of Boston Review).
- Before choosing which publishing path – traditional, small press, self-publishing, partner-publishing – is best, literary agent April Eberhardt encourages us to answer the following questions: What is my goal? What is my timetable? How much time am I willing to put into searching for an agent? How much money am I willing to invest? How much patience do I have? How do I define success?
- Don’t buy a $12 glass of mediocre wine at the conference’s lit lounge event when you could take the elevator seven flights to your room, where you have a $12 bottle of cabernet rated 90 points by Wine Spectator.
- Characters in our stories should not fit into neat categories. “Real characters lack perfect insight” (Nathan Hill, author of The Nix).
- Go through the first 30 pages of your manuscript, and look at each paragraph, asking yourself where your book really begins (Sorche Fairbank, Literary agent).
- When rejections from editors or agents are making you feel like you should never have quit your day job, or you’re experiencing burn out, try writing in a new genre: if you usually write memoir, try fiction, or poetry (Jennifer Brown, author of the debut novel Modern Girls).
- Never have a resolution at the end of a chapter; you want to keep the reader reading (Adam Stumacher, author and educator).
- When a Grubbie offers you either a chocolate or a mint before you head into the Manuscript Mart to meet with an agent, ALWAYS choose the chocolate, and do not eat it until after your meeting. Remember: Chocolate is a mood-lifter.
- Change the font in each draft of your manuscript you read. Because our eyes become accustomed to the same font, we might not see mistakes. Changing the font helps us to see the narrative with a different eye (Sorche Fairbank, Literary agent).
- Even if it takes you 15 years to finish your story, it’s worth it. “Whomever is intended to hear it will hear it” (Isabel Wilkerson, Pulitzer Prize winner).
Photo used with permission from Grub Street.
Hi! Thanks for sharing. How useful do you think the Agent & Editor Info sessions are (for the price)? I’m certainly signing up for at least one agent phone call but not sure how many of the other sessions to pay for… thanks!
Hi there, KR.
I’ve attended the muse & marketplace four or five times, and each time I met with an Agent and/or editor. In my experience, it really depends on the agent/editor. Some are more eager to give detailed written and oral feedback, while others you can tell are not interested at all. However, overall, my experience has been positive, in the sense that I walked away with new insights: about what my book is really about, for example. One agent did spend the entire session talking about platform, which was a good thing: I was relatively new to the writing world and needed a good lesson on how to put myself out there. That said, in my opinion, it’s nice to get more craft feedback, and how to best write the book you are meant to write. Of course, agents are looking for what will sell, because, after all, they have to make sure they can, in turn, sell it to an editor at a publishing house. If this is your first time attending, I would say that it is worth meeting with an agent and/or editor. For me, no more than two was plenty. Otherwise, I’d suffer from overload. But, if you can swing three, that might be better, because if two give you similar feedback, then you’ve got something to go on. Or, all three could give feedback that wildly differs from one another. You never know!
Hope this helps!
Let me know how it goes.
Melissa