When A Writer Is Ready to Sell A Manuscript: Take Advantage of the Chicago Literary Scene

by Jamie Freveletti

I'm preparing to give a three hour course at the Off Campus Writers Workshops on how to prepare and sell a manuscript. I've never really done this before, and honestly, I had to think about my own path to publication. While I'm still relatively new to the industry--just 18 months out there--looking back gave me a real chance to review what worked and what didn't. All this from the benefit of hindsight, you undertand. I've amassed a lot of tips over the past 18 months, below are just a couple, because room doesn't permit listing all the others:

Write The Manuscript, Then Write Another If You Must:

When I go through my (relatively) short period of marketing to publication, it helps to have friends who remind me of the years I spent writing prior to even attempting to market. On a recent vacation over the holidays a friend commented that she was always surprised that I'd disappear once during each day to write. I'd forgotten this, but she's correct. Even with the sun and sea beckoning, I'd find time that day to do what I loved.


When I finally sat down and mapped out an actual timeline, here's a bit of it:


I had one manuscript completed, three others 60,000 words in, one (thriller) screenplay submitted to a contest, and three short stories written before I even took my first step to marketing. Interestingly enough, the screenplay contest was the only instance of marketing-if submitting it to a contest counts--that I had actually attempted before sending out my manuscript. (I still love the screenplay, and I intend to send it to my West Coast agent for submission, but first I want to turn it into another manuscript. It's a good story, and I really think those characters deserve a whole novel before they get sold as 95 pages of dialogue).


Meet Other Writers in The Chicago Literary World:


I've been helped along by other writers who came before, many listed on the sidebar of this blog. Laura Caldwell was the first writer who graciously invited me to a post signing dinner with her friends. I was unpublished--everyone else was well published. She made me feel welcome and gave me a glimpse into the world that I wanted to join. Marcus Sakey and I were in an early writing group I'd been invited to join. He was navigating through his first novel's publication at the time and I learned by watching him and still call him for advice. Libby Hellman was always gracious when we met at conferences and invited me to join her writing group (I couldn't at the time due to a standing aikido class). That writing group included Michael Dymmoch. I didn't know Barbara, Sean, Bryan, David H, or Kevin, but I'd met David Ellis and he once gave me tips at a conference.


Julie Hyzy critiqued my first attempt to actually show anyone something I'd written. This is a funny story. I was attending my first Love is Murder conference and I'd signed up for a manuscript critique by one of the published authors. Somehow my name fell through the cracks and I found myself standing at the registration table trying to correct the situation when Julie walked up and announced that she'd not been given someone to critique. We both laughed, I handed her my manuscript, and off she went. Thirty minutes later she came running back to me and said, "I love this! You can write! Don't worry!"


Need I say that Julie made my year? After that I felt stronger and more confident, though the book I sold was a second manuscript written after the one she'd read. Yes, like many writers that I know, I have a manuscript on the shelf.


Another early friend was Tasha Alexander. Tasha moved to Chicago a few years ago, and she would drag me into groups of industry folks at the pre conference cocktail parties for the former Midwest Literary Festival. I usually try not to insert myself into an industry group unless I'm invited, and Tasha was always the one waving me over. A note: my hesitance to insert myself meant that I met industry professionals a lot later on in my marketing attempts. Probably not the best way to market oneself, but it all worked out in the end.

Join A Writing Organization.

One of the first organizations I joined was Sisters in Crime http://www.sistersincrime.org where I met Luisa Buehler and Gail Lukasik, both of whom gave me advice in the early going. I'm told that there is a "guppies" group at SisInCr that is a great forum for new writers, though I haven't used the group myself.

There are many other writers both published and unpublished that have helped lend their support, assistance, and advice over the past years and still do. I couldn't begin to list them all here, but I do my best to acknowledge them in my books. The Chicago literary community is thriving, and if you're lucky enough to live here and you want to join it, your best bet is to begin attending the conferences in the area and adding to the fun. You won't regret it.

Congrats to Laura!

Who was nominated for a Shamus award for RED BLOODED MURDER.

Way to go!

What's in a Title? Everything (a/k/a Help, please)

by Laura Caldwell

Titles are the one of trickiest parts of writing a book. I learned that years ago with a novel of mine that was, ultimately, called The Night I Got Lucky. Originally, the book had been named What You Wish For. It was about a woman who got everything she ever wanted overnight and not only has to deal with the consequences but with the feeling of not having contributed to her life. Ultimately, I hoped the book was an essay on the tests of marriage. But the original title wasn't working for a number of people on my team, and so we went back to the drawing board. What should we call it? We came up with hundreds of titles in the next few weeks, but none of them seemed right. I’d written three women’s fiction novels (“chick lit,” if you will), and everyone thought we needed a title in that vein, something sassy, beguiling. We went round and round. Finally, still no perfect title in sight, we settled on The Night I Got Lucky, a (hopefully) catchy reminder that the character, in one night, had gotten it all. Of course, the title had a sexier implication. And that’s the way most readers saw that title. I have to admit, I’ve never liked it, never been comfortable with it, although I love the book and I’m immensely proud of it.

This summer my Izzy McNeil trilogy was released. I know y’all are sick of hearing about it, but just as a reminder for the purposes of this blog, the titles were Red Hot Lies, Red Blooded Murder, and Red White and Dead. I'm now writing four more Izzy novels, and we're trying to decide again about the titles. Should we stick with the red theme? Izzy is, after all, a redhead and red is a powerful burst of the word with lots of mysterious implications. But I'm afraid readers might get confused. They might wonder, did I read that red one or that other red one? I know this confusion because the same thing happened to me with Robert Ludlum’s books featuring Jason Bourne. I couldn't distinguish between the The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Ultimatum or The Bourne Hell (was that one of them? Kinda like that title). So, now we're trying to decide whether to move onto another color. A blue series perhaps? Something like, (just tossing these out there) - The Blue Room, The Blue Hat, The Blue Diamonds? Is that too simplistic? Maybe we should stick with red albeit in a different way, maybe using synonyms like ‘crimson’ or ‘scarlet’? And if we were to cast aside the red, how could we keep that theme in there somewhere? Perhaps have my name in red? Or have a red icon on each cover? We're all brainstorming over here. If you have any thoughts, we'd love to hear 'em.