Samhain Publishing Ltd. Weblog

Things I’ve learned during my first 2 days at the Samhain editor’s retreat at Hilton Head.

Sasha doesn’t sit still much—which works out great when you have a stocked kitchen because she makes/cooks some pretty damn tasty things to eat.

It gets light really late in South Carolina—it’s still dull out at 7am.

There’s nothing editors like talking about more than books.

All us editors are looking for same thing… a book we can get excited about.

There are aspects of the publishing business that I didn’t even know I didn’t know about.

It’s not just me—everyone thinks the cover for Lexxie’s Couper’s next release, The Sun Sword, is beautiful ;)

Doctor Pepper is good.

I was surprised by the amount of the people in the airport and on the planes that pulled out a book and spent time reading.

There’s more…but Marty’s frying bacon and Tera and Sasha are making sautéed mushroom, pepper, and onion omelets…so everything else I have to say is going to have to wait :)

Cheers from Hilton Head.

Queries

While they might make an author’s life more difficult, a good query letter can make an editor’s life much easier. But notice I said “a good query letter”. So, what makes a query letter good?

Well, after reading hundreds of submissions over the past 2 years I’d like to go into a few things I often find missing from a query letter and a few things that I’d rather do without.

Picking your battles

My dad wasn’t a man of many words. When he did have something important to say it often seemed to come out in what many would consider a cliché. But knowing the man he was—a man who believed and lived in the idioms he tended to use—they never seemed clichéd to me.

Growing up he would often tell me, “Menace, if it’s something worth doing, it’s worth doing right.” The perfectionist in me was drawn to this phrase even as a child. Then, as I grew older and began to deal with the world and the people in it, I took another of my dad’s sayings to heart, “You need to pick your battles.”

This is something the adult perfectionist in me uses to stay sane because seriously, if you put your everything into everything you’ll end up burning out with nothing done right.

So why am I going on about my dad and old phrases? I have a point that I’ll get to eventually and this does even have a little something to do with editing, I swear…