Last week I participated on a panel at the Denver Creative Business Expo for Lighthouse Writers Workshop. The panel, Your Writing Career: Publishing, Marketing, and Honing the Craft, featured Lighthouse writers and faculty sharing our professional knowledge, experiences, ideas, and funny stories about vampires behaving badly with other Denver-area writers.
Participants asked a lot of great questions about the publishing process. We covered nearly everything from completing a manuscript to networking, querying agents, finding a publisher, and marketing.
During my agent and publisher search, I kept the details relatively quiet on the blog front, certain that sharing too much information about potential-but-not-yet-solidified good news would trigger a message to the universe (Attention Universe. Writer getting cocky in aisle three. Dispatch bad beat-down mojo immediately.) and knock me back to humility. Once the good news was official, I kind of forgot about details (because… book deal! Look, shiny!).
When I started down this road, I spent long hours online, in book stores, and in person devouring information on the process of writing and publishing books. What can I expect? What are the dos and don’ts? Any anecdote or tip sheet or sample query letter helped, and I continue to learn and grow as a writer (creatively and business-wise) through the shared knowledge and experiences of others. So, to add to the ever-growing writers’ information web, I’d like to pass along my own completely unscientific, unsolicited, sometimes rambling and always 100% biased thoughts and tips for writer-readers. Or reader-writers. Or just curious onlookers who wonder how one becomes a published author.
Over the next unspecified, non-consecutive number of days/weeks/months (hey, I don’t like commitments. They totally infringe on the flighty artistic whimsy required to maintain my creative outlook.), I’ll post a series of articles sharing my *cough* self-proclaimed *cough* expertise about writing and publishing a novel, covering such topics as:
- Writing a good story, including workshops, critiques, revisions, and changing the names of characters based entirely on friends and family members who might otherwise recognize themselves and react unfavorably
- Finding an agent, including query letters, synopses, over-analyzing rejections, and other forms of self-torture you can perform from the comfort of your own home
- Making the sale (and surviving the before-and-after wait!)
- Conferences, events, and networking
- Doing what you love (writing full time, financing your life’s work, stuff like that)
- Reader’s choice (like, if someone wants to hear about anything in particular. Just ask!)
As with all creative endeavors, writing and publishing a book takes talent and more than a handful of lucky stars.
*Pauses to thank hers… thank you!*
But it also takes a good dose of perseverance, careful planning, professionalism, business sense, research, hard work, insomnia, coffee (no relation), burritos, and head-banging-on-desk-ing. I hope that by sharing my experiences (not my burritos—mine!), I can help. Or inform. Or at least… entertain.
Stay tuned. And, happy writing, all!
Posted by Sarah Ockler 
