January 14, 2026 – Starting Over

Last year, I was basically asked to sit tight. I had an agent, and my book moved through the editing process in-house at Birch Literary Agency. Everything checked out and around November of last year, Lori began shipping my book around to publishers. She let me know she would start at the top with the “big dogs” and move down.

After many levels of publishing houses never responded to Lori, without any feedback as to why, the book was essentially without a home or a way forward.

Lori had asked me to work on a sequel so that I would be ready for selling the series, so last year I wrote, but did not edit the second book in the series. In the fall, I got the news that Lori had to take a step back from being an agent due to health concerns. I have been deeply appreciative of all that she’s done for me, and for believing in my book enough to sign me on as an author for her.

While all this was going on, I had another passion project and I began writing a completely different book with a new series in mind. Now I’ve gotten two books written in the “Midlife Crisis Murders” series that I’ve cooked up, and am back to querying and trying to navigate in the world of agents and publishing. I’ll do my best to update more regularly here.

So far, I’m trying to be more selective with my queries, and more targeted. I’m also grateful for the MWA for connecting me with a mentor, Ed Aymar, who is helping me to make it through this process. I’ll begin querying soon and will share here how it is going!

June 26, 2024 - Nearly Seventeen Months In

I have an agent!!! It was the person I was always hoping for and I am so thrilled to be working with Lori Colvin from Birch Literary Agency! She emailed me a couple of weeks ago to ask if we could talk and when we connected, it was “the call!”

We went over all the details of the processes for working with the agency, how the manuscript moves forward through editing and being out on submission and when I can expect to hear updates as we move along. It will still be months away from any real news, but for now, I’ll be working on my social media accounts and trying to generate more of my own marketing angles. So far, TikTok has been surprisingly responsive to my posts. I’ll probably need to update this website at some point, and maybe see if someone could help me clean it up to make it run more smoothly. For example, does it make sense for a blog page to be one long run on such at this one? Maybe not? We’ll have to see!

For now, I’m so excited and over the moon to have another step forward for the book and for my potential career as an author! Wohoo!

January 3, 2024 - Eleven Months In

After getting two agents to request full manuscripts, I haven’t had much movement on the book. At first, it was very exciting, and to be honest, it still is, but I haven’t heard back from either in months. I reached out to both shortly after Thanksgiving, and one said she would get back to me the following week (she didn’t) and the other said she usually used the Christmas/New Years Holiday time to catch up on her reading and that she would reach out in the New Year. It is only the third, so I am hopeful that she’ll reach out soon. To be honest, she is the one I hope to hear from. She is the most professional person that I met at the writers conference last summer and I think if anyone has a chance at moving it forward, she does. 

I’ve also come to terms with the fact that she might not. This book might not be something that ever gets published. Aggie helped me to see that, and so I started towards the end of last year working on a new book. Hopefully, the new book is more marketable as a cozy mystery. The idea that Aggie shared with me was that essentially, a “whodunit” isn’t something that sells. There has to be an angle, or a situation that makes it desirable. A well written, good book, especially about ministers, is not something that will sell.

So, what does sell? Something that is really cozy sells. Cozies are easy to write, easy to figure out, and rarely take much to produce. The idea is that a cozy mystery is more about the coffee shop and the holidays and the baked goods than the mystery itself.

At first, I tried really hard to write a cozy, but I couldn’t get excited about it. So I flexed it out a bit. I wrote something that I thought was really funny. Every scenario was over the top. It was hyperbolic humor in a murder mystery. It was more fun to write, but way less cohesive and impossible for me to stitch together. Then I tried to come up with a gimmick, and it has gotten the ball rolling a bit, but I still am so engaged with the actual mystery part that I am not sure that I’m not doing the same thing all over again.

In this current book, I’m trying to focus on the cozy aspects, but what is most interesting and engaging is the mystery. So, my writing is again focusing on the mystery, which is what my last book did. Maybe this one will have more of a cozy nature to it. Maybe I’ll go back through in the editing phase and give it some good cozy scenes to satiate the manuscript. Who knows. It is good to be trying again. Hopefully something happens soon and I hear back from that agent. Happy New Year and let’s keep trying in 2024.

August 17, 2023 – Six Months In

There isn’t a whole lot to update on, which feels kind of like a problem. I’ve been working on the book or editing it or sending it out or going to a conference and then reworking the book over and over for the better part of the past year. And now, it’s just in limbo.

Two agents are currently reading it, but there isn’t a lot for me to do in the meantime. I’ve exhausted all other possible avenues, and I might have to redo the whole thing as a cozy mystery if nothing comes of these two agents currently looking things over.

In the meantime, I have a few other ideas, but am having trouble with them gaining any real traction. I’ll keep writing when I can and hope that it’ll take on some. new energy for me, but I feel like I’m in a bit of a writing slump.

July 24, 2023 – Five Months In

Earlier this month, I attended my first writer’s conference! Sleuthfest was a long weekend of workshops and panels held in a DoubleTree hotel just north of Miami and I am so glad I went.

I did not feel that way at first. For one, it was expensive. It was over $300 to register, over $300 for hotel rooms, I was close enough to drive, but the gas money and the food money added up quickly. The first few panels I went to were okay, but nothing groundbreaking. It seemed that most of the advice being offered was fairly basic and that the writing skills being addressed were rudimentary. If someone doesn’t know what the point of view of their novel is, they probably aren’t going to get very far in writing.

Still, I spent the money to go, so I went. I quickly surmised that it was “the more you put in, the more you get out,” to be there, and so I did my best to show up for the events, talk with the other attendees, and not just keep to myself. After the first full day, it was exhausting and felt more like a chore than actually helpful.

The second day, I had my breakthrough. I attended a morning panel on pacing and finally heard some good advice from the authors who were presenting. After the panel, I thanked one for her suggestions, and she offered to have a conversation with me about my work. A couple of workshops and panels later, and I ran into the helpful author again at the Guest of Honor’s Speech. The speech was fine, but the helpful author and I made a few side comments to one another and I was so glad to hear someone with a similar perspective regarding the proceedings of the conference.

We ended up chatting for hours at the dinner and after the dinner and the Helpful Author gave me the most valuable advice and lessons I’ve received yet in the industry. There were so many questions I had around manuscripts. and genre and she was easily the best person for me to hear some truth from.

The book I wrote probably won’t sell. Even if it is a good book that is well written, it just isn’t marketable. It is too deep for a cozy and too religious and quaint for a mainstream audience. So, it floats between and without enough of a recognizable anchor, it remains floating without the attention needed from an agent.

Oh. And the Helpful Author told me that I will become an author if I keep working at it, and that she’d be happy to show my book to her agent once it finds its genre. Or if I write another one, the Helpful Author will share that book with her agent. She is now my mentor not just for writing but for the industry. She helped me articulate a good pitch for the agents who were. at the conference and one of them requested a full manuscript (yay!)

So now, there are two agents considering me, I have a mentor in the industry, I have clarity on what it takes to get published, and encouragement to do so (because if half of the people. I saw at that conference are published authors, then there is no doubt that I can do this too as long as I keep writing and keep submitting.)!

If you have a writer’s conference available to you – DO IT.

June 16, 2023 – Four Months In

I’m fairly certain that this is not the best way to do this blog. There are definitely easier ways to do posts and add posts to a blog that are NOT what I’ve done here. That being said, I’m committing to do it this way. Also, someone new followed me, so I am mostly saying this because I need you to know that I know that I’m an idiot.

Now that we’ve gotten that squared away, I wanted to update a little bit and say there’s not much to update on. At least not in terms of what is happening. I did a revised edition and sent it to the agent who asked for an updated draft. After a gentle nudge, I heard that she hadn’t had time to review it yet, so I’m still waiting on that. I have heard back from quite a few queries that were over 100 days old that I had written off as not interested. I guess it is good to hear back, but they were all “no” replies, so it wasn’t really that great.

I’m not sure from the Query Tracker site how to feel about what I’ve seen. I’ve statistically queried many more people than most other people who use the site. I think the average is around 40 and I’ve done will over 100. I have a very low acceptance percentage (less than 1%) but my negative replies are much lower than many others as well.

That basically means, I have a lot of outstanding queries for now, so we’ll see what happens to that number. My guess is it’ll end up being a very high percentage in the end. That being said, the fact that a few folks are waiting to reply means that technically (as per the internet’s wisdom) I am in their “maybe” column. This means that they’ve read my query letter and sample pages and have not yet decided to say no. In a way that is good because plenty of times, it is very easy for an agent to just say no. I am at least giving them pause.

If it doesn’t translate into requests or ultimately finding an agent, however, I’m not sure that I really think it matters that I am a “maybe.” I mean, “Maybe” that is encouraging to some people, but I don’t know that it feels that way to me.

To try and keep my mind off of agents, I am doing two things. First, I am preparing pitches for the Sleuthfest in Miami in July. I’m hoping that by being in person, I might have slightly better luck.

Secondly, I’m writing again. I’m writing very differently this time. It’s a kind of prequal, though it didn’t start out that way. I wanted it to be the more “hot seller” kind of a murder mystery. What I’ve heard back about my initial draft of Eulogy for a Murder is that it is a little slow and has a decent amount of character development. Hopefully I’ve remedied that with a new beginning, but we’ll see. The new attempt was a try and the catchy/flashy writing of someone like Lucy Foley or the former chapter by chapter cliffhangers that were more prominent when stories were told piece by piece in magazines like The Strand.

It is fine so far. I am writing less of it mapped out in my head before hand, though I still have a broad structure idea that I’m trying to stick to. It’s not as fun or clever as the whodunnit method I did for Eulogy for a Murder, but it is a much more fast paced and exciting kind of a book. If EfaM doesn’t take off because it isn’t exciting enough, then hopefully this will be a good replacement.

If that ends up being the case, I don’t know how I’d feel about things. I am enjoying writing it, but not nearly as much as I enjoyed writing EfaM. This one is much more of a “what the audience wants to read” kind of a book than “what I think is clever and what I like to write” kind of book. Is that a part of art? Is it tied to its reception, especially if it is a book? It will never get published or go anywhere outside of my computer if someone doesn’t deem it at least somewhat marketable.

My writing style is different for this one too. I’m less exacting at this first pass, knowing how much I’ll rewrite future drafts. I’m also more linear. So far, I’ve just opened one document and let it all flow out. For EfaM, I had floating chapters that I tied together over time. It was harder to bring it all together, but more fun to write that way.

All in all, we’ll see how things go, but this book (I think) may be more appealing commercially, but less fulfilling to write, so we’ll see what happens here if that proves true.

May 23 , 2023 – Three Months In

After sending in 77 submissions, receiving 18 negative replies, seeing 58 outstanding submissions, and one request for a full manuscript, I was ready to take a break from querying. In my experience, the negatives and the no replies didn’t bother me too much. I’ve seen other aspiring authors write elsewhere about getting even two negative replies and being devastated because their beta readers enjoyed their manuscript. My guess is that they didn’t do much research on how this process works.

It was still exciting to find new agents and send out queries for me. I had hope, and I still do, every time I send a query that this will be the right agent for me, and I can just feel the certainty that they will love my work and advocate for it to be published. The querying didn’t and doesn’t bother me.

The joining didn’t either. Neither did the critiques. In fact, I kind of enjoyed the whole process. I felt like I was taking steps towards making the vision a reality, so it was nice.

The hard part was finding time to do it. I don’t know how other authors manage. Maybe they don’t have a job or a family or both? Finding time to write is hard enough. Finding time to try and share your writing with the right agent is even harder. Honestly, for me at least, it ate into the time I spent writing. As a result, I haven’t written in a while. Between a full time job, and life with a toddler, I just don’t have the capacity to do more.

Still, there seems to be progress. I have resubmitted a draft to the agent who gave me feedback and asked for a revised manuscript. It took a while and I ended up getting a reader from Upwork to give me some feedback on the section I added to the beginning. I needed to know if it made for good pacing and if it still fit for a good whodunit mystery. The feedback I got was very helpful.

The other thing I did to enhance my manuscript was to properly style my submission. Thankfully, someone I follow on twitter gives advice on these things from time to time. A cursory google search would have probably helped too, but I didn’t think about the specifics beyond having a manuscript with 12 point font, in Times New Roman that was double spaced with one inch margins. The title page has to be specific. The chapters have to be specific. Hopefully these polishing touches are making it easier for my potential agent to read it all.

I’ve wondered a lot throughout this process about how many good books we are missing out on because an author doesn’t have the time or inclination to find a good way to query or format their manuscript. Obviously, it’s something we’ll never know, but unless someone is determined enough to self publish, it seems like the gatekeeping to getting a book published probably keeps out some gems along with all of the junk.

I’ll keep sending queries. I’ll hopefully hear back from the agent soon.

Regardless, I’m going to Sluethfest near Miami in July. I hope it’ll be a good experience, but again the event isn’t made for kids at all. It just seems impossible to make it work if you have a family. The upside is, it gives me a chance to network with other authors and to pitch my story to a few agents. We’ll see how it goes. Hopefully I’ll have updates before then.

April 27, 2023 – Two Months In

Last month’s theme was joining. This month’s was critiques submissions.

After last month’s critiques for my query and first 10 pages, I felt I had a well honed submission to be able to offer to agents in the querying process. So, I set about sending out two or three a day. It took a while, even with the help of Query Tracker.com to be able to find an agency, find the right agent, learn about their wishlist, adjust my submission accordingly, and submit my query, manuscript, synopsis, forms, or whatever else they asked for in order to be considered.

Not surprisingly, I got a lot of “no thank you”s. I was expecting it, but it still was hard not to get my hopes up any time I saw the notification of a new email alert come through. (I only use email alerts on my author gmail, so the only time I see email alerts are when an agent replies to my query)

Most of the rejections were not surprising. Who the hell do I think I am after all to apply to be a client of agencies that have represented Pulitzer prize winners? I also tried a few long shots, and a few obscure shots. I even tried to do a submission via twitter’s #MoodPitch, which included using artistic renderings of the mood of your book coupled with a brief description to try and increase visibility from agents and entice them to asking for a full manuscript.

Some, though, I was a bit surprised by. One person was looking for Miss Marple-type whodunits, which is exactly what I think this fits in (although I spend a bit more time on character development than the British classics) .

Part of the difficulty of this process is that the agents are so overwhelmed by constant submissions that it is hard for them to offer much more than a “thank you, but I’m going to pass.” It’s understandable. Their job is not to help me understand why they passed. Their job is to critique the merits of the work and then decide if they want to accept or reject that work.

It is hard though to understand what is missing. If so many are not accepting a manuscript, is it because the manuscript isn’t good enough (which may very well be the case!) or because it isn’t marketable (a fear I have because of the church setting/religious back drop)? Is it close, but not quite there? Would a few tweaks make it good enough to be considered? Is it too far from saving and needs to be scrapped? It’s hard to get those answers, even from the agents reviewing the work at Manuscript Academy.

Finally, I did get a response. I was in an airport, traveling home from my work which happened to take me to a small airport on the US/Mexico border in southern Texas. As I sat in the Harlingen airport, I read with disbelief as an agent replied to my query with –

“Hello Adam, 
Thank you for sending your query for “Eulogy for a Murder.” I’d be happy to look at your novel, if you could kindly send it as a Word .doc attachment. Please let me know if it has any history with other agents or editors at major publishing companies. “

I didn’t even care that she got my name wrong! I was so excited to have someone actually request the manuscript. It was my first time having that happen. Okay, it still is the only time it has happened. I sent the agent what I had, and tried to be patient. A few days later, I got this reply –

“Dear Alan, 
While you are a gifted writer and skilled worldbuilder, I found that the mystery fell secondary in the first act of your novel. The character development you achieved of your protagonists’ relationship was compelling, but ultimately I think it distracted from the plot. We want to be hooked on the murder first and then deepen our characters along the way; show us who they are while propelling the mystery forward. I can tell that you are passionate about your work and the community you’ve built among your characters. I would be open to reading a future draft and I applaud you for completing your novel.” 

I was blown away! Of course it would have been great if they said, “I loved it! You’re brilliant! Let me sign you!” But even though they didn’t do that, they still took the time to tell me what needed to happen to take it from a “no” to a possible “yes.” I don’t harbor any illusions that any changes I make are guaranteeing representation, BUT this person went beyond just telling me that the work wasn’t good enough for them. They took the time to instruct me to redraft a new way of moving through the first act that puts the mystery as central to the story instead of secondary to the character development that I focused on so heavily at the start.

AND they said they’d be open to reading a future draft!! Incredible!

Now. All that I need to do is rewrite the beginning and resubmit. I’ll do my best, and I have some ideas already. I just hope they’re still open to receiving my draft when I am able to finish it. I’m excited to be moving forward in this process.

March 30, 2023 – One Month In

The past month has been a lot of joining. The first time I went through a series of queries, I went through every list I could find and blindly queried almost anyone who had anything even remotely close to my genre as an interest. Obviously, it didn’t work.

This time, I started that way, and quickly decided that I should probably start to really invest in the publishing landscape if I was going to have a chance at breaking into this world. I knew what I wanted to share, but I didn’t know what agents wanted to read in the queries and in their first few pages of requested manuscript. I knew I had written a mystery, but I didn’t know any other mystery writers.

So, I joined the Manuscript Academy and the Mystery Writers of America. The Manuscript Academy gave me access to reviews from actual agents who could provide me with video and written critiques and suggestions for my query and for the first ten pages of my manuscript. There were other services being offered, but these were expensive enough, and I didn’t feel like adding to the already ballooning cost of getting something substantial out of the program. Note: I did get randomly selected to have my first page reviewed as part of a live show with an agent, which was extremely helpful for determining how to keep readers’ attention on the first page. It was also fairly encouraging because I got good feedback on my concept and on the writing as a whole.

There was a great 10 minute video review of my query which was helpful, a 10 page critique which was not very helpful, and a 15 minute video review of my query and my critique, which was phenomenal. To the credit of the Manuscript Academy, when I offered feedback saying that my 10 page written critique was not helpful, they offered a supplementary review from their Agent in Residence at no extra cost, and I received incredible feedback form a line-by-line readthrough of the material. All in all, while these services have been costly ($40 per month to belong, $40 for query review, $89 for written review, $99 for 15 min video review), I do think they have been worth it because it has really helped to shape what was “good” into what is going to catch the eye of agents (hopefully).

The Mystery Writers of America is a mixed bag so far. I think it will be helpful in the long run, but some of what I was hoping to get out of it isn’t immediately available. There is supposed to be a mentor program, but that is apparently suspended for the time being. There are manuscript critiques (also $100) and I may avail myself of that service, but the critiques are coming from other writers instead of agents. Not that another set of eyes on the manuscript isn’t helpful, but at this point, I’m still trying to grab the attention of an agent.

The people, however, have been great. The Florida Chapter President, JD Allen has been very responsive to my emails and encouraging for me to attend Sleuthfest this July in Miami. Apparently, this is where the membership really comes into play. This is a chance to take seminars, classes, and pitch to actual agents. It is a three day networking extravaganza and this is my chance to catch the eye of someone if I haven’t done so previously. It is also, however, a very expensive endeavor. Hopefully I can make it work, and by volunteering, I should be able to offset some of the costs of travel, but it is not cheap.

Just to join these various groups and solicit feedback and attend these conferences will probably end up costing me close to $750 if not more. I don’t think I would have done it if I knew that was the cost upfront, but with $100 here, $40 there, and registration fee with a reduced hotel rate thrown in, I am slowly adding up the costs to trying to break in here.

I don’t know how long I’ll stay a part of these groups. In all likelihood, I’ll probably set back from the Manuscript Academy soon because I think I have all that I can get from them at this point. I’ll likely restart my querying process (I had taken a hiatus while I waited for reviews and feedback) and I’ll hopefully be able to make connections at Sleuthfest if not sooner. We’ll see how it all goes I guess.

March 3, 2023 – Querying and More Edits

On the one hand, I’m glad that more people are reading what I’ve written and giving some good feedback. On the other hand, I feel like I wasted half a dozen good potential agents by querying them too soon. I am currently having a few friends look over my draft and it is helpful, but they’re catching small things I ought to have ironed out before I started querying. I thought that by doing all that I did to get to this point (rewriting, grammarly pro review, read through aloud and edit, etc.) that I would have gotten most of the small things, but there are still plenty of errors to go around.

The good news is that I got a 10 minute feedback on my query and I got a lot of good input and encouragement from the agent who read what I wrote. Apparently it was full of great content and really just needs to find the right agent. That was uplifting. Now I just need to make sure that what I have is good enough when I send it out.

I am looking to have two more lit agent reviews – one a written review submitted by next Saturday and another interview review at the end of the month. Two different agents will give me their opinions about the content of my first ten pages, which I think will help immensely in making sure that what I’m crafting is along the lines of what agents are wanting to read. Hopefully it won’t be a huge waste of time (and money).

I’m willing to spend a little bit to get some of the professional eyes on my project, but I’m really not sure I’ve got much more to spare to try and make something happen.

Mostly, right now I’m feeling like I should probably put the brakes on future queries until I get more people to finish reading through the manuscript and offering their input. It will be helpful in the long run, but I already felt geared up to start querying and now, pressing the pause button feels difficult to do.

Maybe I can start writing the next book? Or reading more? I feel like the time I usually blocked off for working on the book needs to go somewhere productive and I’m not sure where yet.

Getting Published