Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Footer notes

I'll be up at Muse in the Marketplace in Boston this weekend with Ben Leroy, and Sorche Fairbank among others. One of the things Muse has us do is read pages ahead of time and then meet with the authors for 20 minutes. I much much much prefer this to those horrid pitch sessions that are the spawn of Satan so common at conferences these days.

I dove in to the pages this weekend. One author's work was pretty good. Good enough in fact that I'm hoping to read more.

Now, if this fellow had put his email address on the header or footer, I would have emailed him and requested additional pages ahead of time, read them, and we could have used our upcoming appointment to cover any issues cropping up in the entire ms. Because it wasn't there, I'll just ask for the pages when I see him. What I'm NOT going to do is ask the conference coordinator for his email because I don't want give her one more thing to do in the frantic run up before a conference. She's already got enough to deal with.

So, word to the wise: if you're taking your pages with you to a conference, or sending them ahead for a critique, put your email address in the footer. You do NOT need to do this on a regular submission to my office of course. This is just for the pages that come to me in strange and unusual ways. Some of the strange ways you do NOT want to employ are listed here
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4 comments:

  1. Mags4/23/08, 10:31 PM

    Grub is kind. To the writers, particularly.

    I hope you have that writer scheduled early on so he can have an amazing rest of the conference (and get to Kinkos if need be).

    ReplyDelete
  2. Julie Weathers4/24/08, 12:09 AM

    That is really sad he forgot that.

    I wish more conferences would do the pre-submission approach. I dread the pitch appointment.

    As for the don'ts list, I always thought the restroom thing had to be a myth. Apparently it isn't, which makes me a little frightened.

    On the other hand, I don't even want to imagine how awkward it is for guy agents to be approached in a restroom.

    Good luck at the conference.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Kitty4/24/08, 8:31 AM

    "I'm sorry I don't have a square to spare, now if you don't mind..."

    ...

    ReplyDelete
  4. Linda4/24/08, 4:34 PM

    Yes, the conference coordinator IS crazed... just had to resubmit my M/S to one of the other lovely agents attending the Grub affair. Um, interesting... wish I had read this post 45 minutes earlier, before I hit the send button. Peace, Linda

    ReplyDelete

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