Or really, fiction writers of all sorts, but mostly for novelists.

I’m not sure what’s been going on for the past few days, but lately I’ve been meeting more and more publishing industry pros and aspiring novelists on Twitter. And along with that comes the influx of linkage.

Ok, so the single most important website for an aspiring novelist is Miss Snark. That’s a given. If you’ve never read this viciously wonderful agent, you need to. Go back to the very first post and read all the way up to her last (she’s hung up her stilettos for good) post. Take notes. Bookmark the Crapometer for when you’re getting ready to query. Read through it again. Take more notes. Follow all instructions and consider all advice. Just do it. Besides, it’s fun!

Now, Miss Snark I’ve known about for years, and have read almost every post on her site. However, #QueryFail is brand new. And it’s not a site; it’s a hashtag. In other words, it’s a stream of tweets from Twitter that are all on one subject, specially marked out using a hashtag. You don’t need to be a member of Twitter to read #QueryFail, but you do need an account if you want to respond to any of them.

What QueryFail is, is a day set aside by agent Colleen Lindsay for all Twitter savvy agents and editors to vent their query frustrations in the form of a 140 character tweet. Many of the tweets are actual lines from queries that the agent/editor rejected such as “Like my protagonist, I definitely could be described as overachiever, and I naturally have hair like Lady Godiva.”, “My book is about a friendship based upon mutual vomiting practices in high school.”, and my favorite- “This book is The Notebook meets The Lord of the Rings.”

You’ll need to scroll through several days of tweets about #queryfail if you choose to follow the above link to access it, but there’s a downloadable file of the actual QueryFail tweets from the actual day at that link.  The agents are planning to make this a regular thing, but no schedule has been set. And by the way? #QueryFail even got attention from The Guardian. No joke! There’s also a #novelfail, but I haven’t had much time to check into that.

And the third page that you may want to consider, is a 25 point list of why your fiction is being passed over, courtesy of Andromeda Spaceways. It’s funny, but not hilarious. Dirty, but not filthy. But all in all, a pretty good list.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 at 11:30 pm and is filed under blog response, fiction, links, not me, novel writing, Publishing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.