OA's New Feature: 'Dear OAbby' Advice Column

Operation Awesome wants to answer your questions about writing, finding an agent, the publication process, and more! Consider this new feature an advice column, with your questions and our answers (when we don't know the answers, we'll collaborate with other writers and publishing professionals to get those answers!).

Send an email to operationawesome6@gmail.com with 'Dear OAbby' Question in the subject line. Feel free to go as much into detail about your situation as you want; we may edit for space and clarity. Nothing is off-limits here - ask specifics, generalities, what-ifs, or theoreticals. We will keep the author's name, and any other identifying information, confidential.

Looking forward to answering your questions!

Everything You Need to Know About... Query Letters!

Contest season is coming around the bend, and whether you're planning to submit to Pitch Wars, Pitch Slam, Nightmare on Query Street, or another contest, there are some common requirements for every submission package. Over the next few weeks, Operation Awesome will be giving and rehashing tips, advice, and 'lessons learned' about each of these required pieces of the submission package.

So, without further ado, let's start with QUERY LETTERS.

Top Query Tips from the Operation Awesome Crew

KARA: Specific details are what make query letters stand out for me when I read them. "Character meets a horrible fate" is not as eye-catching as "Character will be kicked out of the house and be at risk of being eaten by zombies." Take out all the vague phrases in your query letter and provide specifics instead. Don't worry about a "spoiler," because query letters are meant to get an agent/editor interested in your novel, and specific details are what do that.

MELINDA: Please don't tell me you've been writing since you were a kid or that your book is sure to be a bestseller. You have no idea how many times I read those words. They scream, "novice." We've all been writing since we were kids, and we all have hopes of our books being bestsellers. Tell me something relevant that will make me want to read more. Leave out the fluff.

J: If you're going to compare your book to another book, that other book better

• be in the same AGE market as your book.
• not be a cross-genre seller (Harry Potter, Divergent, Hunger Games, The Shining... if it's a top 10 best-seller, NO, don't use it).
• be in the same genre as your book.
• have enough in common with your book that one can read your query and the online description blurb of the book and draw parallels.

"It's just like 'A History of the World in 6 Glasses,' except it makes no reference to real history, and it's about vampires, so the only drink is blood, and the target audience is pre-school. But otherwise, it's totally the same." No.

The purpose of book comparisons is to figure out which 500 people regular readers to market your book to first. Sure, everyone might love your book later, but all books have to start with a core audience. Sticking with my ridiculous example, "A History of the World in 6 Glasses" would first have been marketed to people who enjoy food history books. Would fantasy writers love the book for the new world-building angle? You bet! But they aren't the core audience, they're not where the focus belongs during the initial launch. The book isn't shelved with writing books, it's shelved with gastronomy history. If there were a magazine ad campaign, the ads would be in "Food Network Magazine" not in "Apex."

LEANDRA: Have an intriguing first line. You can't land the fish if you don't hook it first. ;)

JAIME: Make sure you answer three simple questions. What does my main character want? What's standing in their way? What will happen if they don't succeed?


Operation Awesome's Library of Posts About Writing Query Letters

Query Writing 101: Writing a Basic Query
Query Writing 102: Query Dos and Don'ts
The Ultimate Cheat Sheet on Query Letters

What to Expect When You're Expecting Your First Book

So far, the months running up to the debut of my novel have been simultaneously exhilarating and nervewracking. Thank goodness for groups like The Fearless Fifteeners, a group of middle grade and young adult authors debuting in 2015, who offer a haven for our freakouts and squealing in our Top Secret forum.

In one of the threads in said forum, we've been pointing each other in the direction of helpful posts on surviving our debut years. So I thought I'd share them here, for the benefit of those who are also debuting this year--or any year in the future, really (unless you're unlucky enough to debut just before the zombie apocalypse starts--in which case, you're pretty much out of luck).

Voila, a list of posts gathered from the web, about "things I'd wish I'd known" and "learn from my mistakes" and debut books (in no particular order):

Debut Authors Lessons by Mary Robinette Kowal

Timeline and Checklist for YA or MG Book Release by Lisa Schroeder

10 Things Nobody Tells You About Being a Debut Novelist by Tim Federle

After The Book Deal series by Jonathon Auxier

Author Visits: A Beginners Guide by James Dawson

Advice for Authors on School Visits by Book Moot

On School Visits...A School Librarian's Perspective from Dawn Finch

Expectation vs. Reality by Jodi Meadows

A Dozen Things That Debut Authors Have Taught Me by Erin Murphy

Nine Things I Wish I'd Known About Publishing by Alison Cherry

24 Things No One Tells You About Book Publishing by Curtis Sittenfeld

What I Learned about Publishing (Or An Open Letter to the Debut Class of 2015)by Sharon Biggs Waller

When Friends & Family Read Your Book: Survival Tips by Kate Brauning

Hope you find these helpful! If you have any other tips or favorite posts to direct us to, please do so in the comments!

Querying for the Young Writer

Hello everyone! Its been awhile since I've posted on here. That's because I have been absent for the past month. For the first ten days I was on a cruise in Alaska with my family. It was really a breathtaking experience and I'll talk more about that in my next post.

But today's post has to deal with the other thing I was doing this July. For two weeks I was a Residential Assistant at a creative writing camp called Shared Worlds. Its a fantasy writing camp in which kids from ages 13-17 get together in world building groups and create worlds together from scratch. Its truly an exciting experience. I should know: I went there myself for three years.

All of the kids who went to camp with me understand what its like to be a young writer. Some of them are more advanced than others. Some of them have been writing for longer. But they all have aspirations to one day have books in print.

So today, I'm talking a bit specifically to young writers, especially those who are querying or want to start querying in the future. I started diving into the trenches when I was sixteen, so I know how it can be. Let's go over some tips for querying your novel.

1) Seek advice

This is important for any writer out there. Everyone should get multiple sets of eyes on their query and first pages before sending them off. But for young writers in particular, this can be a helpful resource. If you were like me in high school, you didn't show a ton of people your writing. Taking this into consideration, the querying process can seem really frightening. So before diving in blindly, you want to do research. Talk to other writers online who have been through this. Sign up on agentqueryconnect.com and find people who are willing to lend you a helping hand. They're out there and super friendly. I don't know where I'd be without the people online who gave me advice for the querying process.

2) Beg for Critiques

If you are a young writer, people will be inclined to critique you less harshly. Again, if you were like me, you received heaps of praise from your peers and teachers and believed, naively, that you were the best writer ever. It only takes a stack of rejections to tell you otherwise. It is possible that, as a young writer, you have never received a thorough critique. Beg for one. Hand out your writing under the guise of 'tear it apart. Leave no word alive.' Not only will it improve your manuscript, but its better to get a harsh critique from people you trust first.

You have to build up a backbone to enter the trenches. It might hurt, but your writing will be better for it.

3) Query as if you were Older

Something I see in the slush pile a lot when it comes to young writers: A stress on their age. People who point out that they are 'just sixteen' or 'in high school' and writing a book. You don't see older writers saying their age. Why? Because its not the age that matters. Its the writing.

I think some writers stress their age as a bragging point. Like 'I'm young but I'm querying and that's special'. Honestly, its awesome for ANYONE to be able to finish a book, no matter the age. If you're a good writer, then age won't make a difference. My agent didn't know I was eighteen until we had the call. And it worked out fine for me.

Those are three important tips for young writers, though some of that advice holds true for writers of any age. Get advice and get critiqued. And young writers, never stop trying to get better. You have a long road ahead of you, but you have the talent and the drive to back it up.

Happy Writing!

"It's Called (Writing)"

I love it when I see interviews of film and TV stars and the interviewer is really fixated on how the actor's latest role is nothing like their last one. Or perhaps the talk show host knows the actor well enough to say that the role is so disturbingly unlike their "real" personality.

The actor will usually try to explain something that they drew on (inside themselves, or by observation) to convincingly play a crazed serial killer, but when pressed, they're eventually reduced to some form of "It's called acting." (Even Elmo has used that explananation; see the video at the bottom of the post)

This cracks me up, because as writers we fall under the same kind of scrutiny. If we include a matricidal villain, we get questions (and assumptions) about how we feel about mothers. If we include poisons or bioweapons in our spy thriller, people stop accepting invitations to dinner parties at our homes (although, the NSA or FBI may occasionally arrive without an invitation).

It's as if people think that the phrase "write what you know" is more of a natural law than fairly impractical advice. After all, if we were all writing only what we ourselves had experienced, fiction would be a much narrower field.

There could be no works with characters of the opposite gender, no stories featuring characters beyond the people we meet in our daily lives, no re-imaginations of historical events. No fantastical creatures from the "here there be dragons" portions of the map, rather than the real-life ones on display in zoos or sleeping on our sofas.

So here's to imagining worlds and experiences beyond our own little spheres--and writing them so well that we can know them ourselves. And bringing readers along on that journey too.