You'll notice there were three books planned at that time: Song 0f Scarabaeus (then called Scarabaeus), Children of Scarabaeus, and Soul of Scarabaeus. I amalgamated the second and third story ideas into one book, once I'd decided the series would be a duology, and wanted to call it Soul of Scarabaeus, but my editor thought Soul was too similar to Song. I'd felt compelled to name the books in an alphabetically chronological (or is that chronologically alphabetical?) manner so they'd appear in the correct order in a search engine. That's the editor in me being all anal retentive. Oh well.
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Evil Editor flashback
Back in 2006, I sent my fledgling query letter for Song of Scarabaeus to Evil Editor, who snarkily savaged it. This is a free service provided by the sheer graciousness of the Evil One, for anyone who dares approach. Evil Editor just chose my query as the first in his new Classics line, and reposted it here. It's been almost five years since the original post - I've since got an agent, sold two books, had two nice award nominations, not to mention the baby, moving countries, and MCP's writing career taking off as well.
5 comments:
I loved reading your old query! A friend of mine sends me her queries whenever she is writing a book and I find it all very fascinating. Also, I appreciate you trying to make your books be alphabetical. It would have bothered me too!
Hehe, that reminds me of Miss Snark from Query Shark. I don't think I could be so bold as to post my query on one of those sites, but that's awesome that you did! It's always fun to see the evolution of a query. :)
Took me a while to work up the courage to put my query "out there" as well, but I figured it couldn't hurt. And it's anonymous... until you end up selling the book, of course!
I've just hopped over to your blog from EE's site.
Congratulations on getting your baby published, Sara. It seems like the type of book I'd enjoy, However... the huge bump in sales may not happen courtesy of me, because I cannot find it in a bookstore, and I searched in two! And I'm a fellow Melburnian! (I tried Collins and an independent). Any ideas?
Hi Jo-Ann - the book isn't published in Australia but you can buy it at online stores. I recommend bookdepository.co.uk which has great prices and free shipping.
Or drop me an email with your address and I'll send you a signed copy. (That's not an open invitation, folks. My toes are freezing this cold Melbourne night, and being nice to someone might make me feel better.)
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