You had me at hello...

My agent is blogging about me today! How cool is that?

So a little more back story…

The conference was DARA - the Dallas Area Romance Authors conference. The wicked sexy, fast driving Donnell posted about it on my local RWA loop and I rode down with her and the super hot, NYT bestselling Gena Showalter. Luckily for me, Gena loves meeting people, introducing people, having lunch with people… drinks with more people. (Although she claims she’s really shy)

This was a smaller conference with loads of friendly people and great workshops, and it worked out that we (I say we—but it wasn’t me at all—LOL) were able to get a great group together for an after dinner outing. (drinks)

I didn't schedule to pitch to Kristin because I’m deathly afraid of pitching (stupid fear really) and besides, she had just-- like days before--form rejected me. Now this ties into her post yesterday about being professional and not taking things too personally. And to be perfectly honest it was a tiny bit awkward sitting across from someone who rejected me—and yet I still managed to be fun and normal (it says so in her blog, so it must be true). Actually after the initial discomfort, it was easy. If you’ve ever met her- you know it would be very hard to not like her. And we had a wonderful time that night with Gena trying to query her about her Muffin Man book—do you know the muffin man? SO it was a wonderful relaxed thing. Happened months ago and I wouldn’t have even mentioned it in my 2nd query since I honestly wouldn’t have expected her to remember me…but there was a method to my madness.

I wanted to make sure the query made it past her reader/assistant. And no assistant is ever going to reject a query of someone the agent may, possibly know personally. It is too awkward if they do because it looks like the agent rejected them (make sense?). She had also come on one of my loops and basically said I'm looking for XYZ and my book was XYZ--so I mentioned that too. So I put these two things in the very first para—basically making it a "You had me at hello" query for her. IMO.

Naturally this is not something you can fake- if you didn’t meet the person than it looks real shady. But use what you’ve got. It doesn’t always mean spending money. A lot of agents spend a week on a Yahoo loop. Mention it. Conferences and writers loops tell the agent you are actively participating in the industry. Always a good thing.

Of course this only gets you past the query stage. The rest, well, that’s another set of planets aligning.

And deep thought for the day: It wouldn’t really be art if everyone loved it.