✨Could a Pitch Party Be Your Key to Querying Success? It was for Shifa Saltagi Safadi!✨

Plus, the return of new 📕Books with Hooks🪝written critiques, and Kao Kalia Yang and Aimie K. Runyan want you to succeed on your own terms!

Happy Tuesday, writing friends!

How is everyone? Is the writing going well? If you’re starting the week in need of a pick-me-up, you’ve come to the right place—kicking off today’s newsletter exclusively for our paid members, we’ve got a Q&A with Shifa Saltagi Safadi (whose middle grade novel-in-verse, Kareem Between, is out today), with responses to our questions that make us wish she was our real-life writing bestie for those days when we need talking off a ledge. Until we’re able to make that happen, we’ll just have to do our best to try to adopt Shifa’s pragmatically positive mindset. And if you’ve never heard of a twitter pitch party, you’ll want to read on to find out how one was the key to Shifa’s success.

We’ve also got an essay from award-winning writer Kao Kalia Yang, whose work crosses audiences and genres (her middle grade debut, The Diamond Explorer is out next week, and she’s also written non-fiction, memoir, opera librettos…). We love the way she describes her “unpredictable” career, which has been a success at least in part because she’s never imposed limits on “the ways in which I would adventure with words.” Her essay is filled with gorgeous lines like this one, but don’t let the beautiful language distract you from the very practical, wise advice she deploys them in service of! Imagine if we could shake off the limitations we feel are holding us back the way that she’s managed to do?! New York Times bestseller list, here we come!

We’ve also got a video from Aimie K. Runyan, whose latest historical fiction, Mademoiselle Eiffel, is out today. Having published nine novels since 2016 (plus one co-authored effort), Aimie is a veteran novelist, well-versed in the challenges of the publishing industry. Her video is filled with clear-eyed observations (“…it’s art when you're working on it, and it's a commodity when it's finished and that's just the honest to goodness truth of the matter”) that all aspiring authors would be wise to tuck away for future use.

Last, but certainly not least, Friday marked the return of brand-new📕Books with Hooks🪝segments on the podcast, so this week we’ve got written critiques from Carly and CeCe—two for each of the queries reviewed on the show!

That’s all for now. Happy reading!

❤️ The Shit No One Tells You About Writing Team