by Kelly Carey Writers are constantly advised, “Make sure your manuscript is ready before you submit”. But how can you really know? You’ve edited, revised, spell checked, and incorporated feedback from your critique group. (If you don’t have a critique group yet, make this your goal for 2015.) You’ve let it sit, so you can have some space from your words, and then you’ve come back multiple times for more revising, found that typo that spell check missed and still you wonder, “Is this ready?”. I suggest you channel your inner rock star and take your manuscript on an imaginary World Concert Tour. Pretend you are reading your manuscript out loud to massive audiences as many times as Taylor Swift has performed “Shake It Off”. Could you share your story over and over again and still love it? Give your manuscript the World Tour Litmus Test. I recently spent a week reading a published story to preschool and kindergarten classes. The nerves subsided by the fifth reading in the same week, and I learned to pause for giggles or to build tension, but the excitement stayed high. I wondered, could I keep that level of enthusiasm if I had to read my story 50 more times or a hundred? Then I thought about my unpublished manuscripts and did a mental test run of readings. What would it feel like to read and reread those unpublished manuscripts? If your manuscript is ready for submission, be certain you would be thrilled to share it thousands of times. After all, once you sell your manuscript, dozens of folks will be spending months and years working to illustrate, edit, publish and market your story. Make sure you have a piece that will continue to excite you, your team, and your audience. Get back on your imaginary tour bus and when you hit your next venue, put real people in your pretend audience. Would you be proud to share the story with your friends, your co-workers, the folks at the gym? What if you booked a gig to read it aloud at the next SCBWI conference? Would you be thrilled or embarrassed if you looked out into the audience and saw Kevin Henkes or Jane Yolen taking a seat? If you are dreaming of the concert t-shirts, the multiple city tour stops, and packed venues of screaming fans and you feel emboldened by the strength of your manuscript, then your story just might be ready for its world tour - I mean ready for submission.
1 Comment
by Kelly Carey If I could combine unlimited funds with my overactive imagination, I would build a Beauty & the Beast inspired library and twirl through the stacks in a yellow ball gown. While this fantasy will remain a dream, there is a website that has helped me capture a slice of my perfect library. I have built my virtual dream library on Goodreads and you should too. Goodreads is a free website for book lovers and a wonderful tool for writers. Don’t be scared by Goodreads. Sign up is easy and free and you can explore as much or as little as you like. You don’t need to ring every bell and sound every whistle on the site. Why not just start by dreaming up your ultimate library? Karen Price has a fantastic YouTube tutorial about Goodreads that will get you started: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZ5-DSEjryw . You’ll need to provide your email address, invent a password and then the site will prompt you to rate twenty books in a genre or genres of your choosing. That’s it. Once you’re on Goodreads, use it to achieve your writing goals. A universal nugget of advice on how to improve as a writer is read. Read everything in your genre and maybe even things near your genre. Goodreads is a fantastic place to track all the books you have read. Once you read a book, pop it on a shelf in your virtual Goodreads library. You can catalog the books to your own specifications. You don’t need to worry about Dewey and his decimal system. I’m a picture book writer, so my shelves include character driven picture books, rhyming picture books, issue based picture books and a shelf for my favorite picture books. Need to keep track of comparable titles for your query letters? Searching for comp titles? Goodreads helps you do this as well. I use my shelves to track comparable titles. I can build a shelf with books similar to my newest manuscript. And I can scroll through my virtual library to find those titles. When I’m chatting with writing friends, at a writing conference or reading writing blogs or newsletters and someone mentions a book I should read, I can put the book on my Want-to-Read shelf. This virtual shelf is much neater than random scraps of notes or scribbles on the side of a dry cleaning tag. Even better, once I have rated or reviewed a book on Goodreads, I will get updates when that author has a new book coming out. Goodreads helps me stay in touch with my industry. Don’t feel you have to rate every book you read. You can place a book on a shelf without rating it. Your thoughts on that book can remain your little secret. But really, if you loved the book, rate it. Help out your fellow authors with a great rating and a good review. That’s bankable good karma! Goodreads is a free website for book lovers. If you are an author, you are by definition a book lover. This site is for you and while it does have a spectacular feature to help published authors market their books, don’t wait until you have a book to market to get involved with Goodreads. This site is the place where you can build your virtual children’s literature library. Set a goal this month to sign up for Goodreads. Then set goals to add books to your library every month. Before you know it, you will be a virtual Belle! |
Peruse blogs for advice and tips from KidLit creatives.
Categories
All
Archives
February 2024
Click to set custom HTML
Click on the RSS Feed button above to receive notifications of new posts on this blog.
|