With a lovely, impressive, and revised query letter in hand, I officially submitted Rooted in the Sky to two indie publishers this week. Claire’s book is traveling through the US postal service as we speak to Algonquin Books–most famous for publishing Water for Elephants and Big Fish–and Ashland Creek Press, a small independent publisher that has some big love for literary fiction with environment, ecology, and wildlife themes (three themes which Claire’s book definitely contains).
Algonquin tells writers to expect a response within 8-10 weeks.
Ashland Creek Press promises to respond within 4-12 weeks.
In the meantime, I’m going to keep submitting the book to other indie publishers, but these were the two I was most excited about and needed to submit to ASAP. I think they’re the best fit for the book and, honestly, with Algonquin’s recent history of book-to-movie deals, what writer doesn’t occasionally dream of that kind of success?
Cross your fingers that we get an offer soon!
Hannah Karena Jones 
Will be hoping you get an offer soon. As I’ve started submitting smaller pieces of writing, I think the waiting part seems to be harder than the rejections part.
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Couldn’t agree more! Thank goodness writing and blogging serves as a constantly-busy distraction. Before I started blogging I was going half-crazy refreshing my email inboxes every few minutes, running to the mailbox (and thoroughly terrifying the mailman), and counting down the days until I could–maybe–expect to hear back. What sort of stuff are you waiting to hear back about? Are you going to have to wait long?
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Waiting on 2 stories submitted to the same place and then some poetry. One poetry submission for 4 poems was an online submission and says turn around time is usually 2 weeks. The other poems were via snail mail to two other places and could take up to 8 weeks. At least not as long as some waits I’ve been reading about, but still seems forever.
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Snail mail is the WORST. I usually forget I even had that submission out before I get a response back. Boo.
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Reblogged this on Sikandarsid's Blog.
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Reblogged this on Sikandarsid's Blog.
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Thanks for the reblog!
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Good luck. It sounds like an exciting time.
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Thanks! It is! Can’t wait for the even more exciting response :]
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Good luck! I have to agree with creativityorcrazy: the waiting is the hardest part. Next hardest is actually packaging things up to get out the door. Which I need to do this weekend myself!
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That’s exciting! What are you getting out the door this weekend?
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I have a YA novel I’m querying for, seeking representation. I’ve got my research done for the next round to send out, and hopefully I can pull time together to get the query packages out the door. *fingers crossed*
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[crossed fingers!] Did you end up getting definite responses from the first round? That was my least favorite part when I was querying: wondering if agents were still considering or had just thrown my query in the trash without thought or form rejection. I never knew if the time was “right” to start round two!
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Responding here since we ran out of thread above. 🙂
I maintain a spreadsheet when I’m submitting to agents, and I keep stats on each one including preferred submission method, expected response time, whether no reply means no, and agency (so I don’t accidentally submit to two agents at the same agency). If I have a agent marked as “no response means no” and the expected response time passes, I mark them as no by default and move on.
Also, in general, continuing to query is never a bad thing. The only reason I paused for so long is that I started in November, and I knew that December can be a tough time to query (holidays AND a bunch of folks querying after finishing NaNo) and January is catch up for a lot of folks, then I got caught up in my OWN time sinks with the kids, so I’m just getting back to it again now.
But most agents did have listed whether to expect a response or not, and I went by that in general. Some took longer than expected, some were really quick. I got a mix of form rejects and personal rejects, and decided it’s definitely time for round 2. I think my next list has about a dozen names on it, so I really need to get those out and start the waiting game!
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Good luck! That’s incredibly exciting!
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Thank you :]
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Good luck!!! I know another author, Jonathan Evison, who published with Algonquin, and he was very happy. I loved his first book, All About Lulu. He’s getting ready to put out his third.
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Well that’s great to hear, thanks for passing it along! Good publishers can do all the publicity and promotions they want, but a great publisher makes the author happy too. I’m going to go add your friend’s book to my goodreads list right now!
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Good luck.
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Thanks Samir!
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Bonne chance! (Figured I would throw a little multilingual luck in there.)
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Haha, thanks for that! Multilingual luck…I like the odds.
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Progress! Keep on keepin’ on.
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Will do!
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