✨Garrard Conley on leaving just enough research fingerprints on the page✨

Books with Hooks features an emerging author, and NYT bestselling Garrard Conley chats with Bianca. Morgan Strehlow discusses QueryManager, and Carly shines a light on authors' online presence.

Mar 22, 2024

Hello dearest sh*theads 😉 We’re coming dangerously close to the end of March; have you been meeting your writing goals, or will you be cramming in that word count over these last few days? We don’t judge either way, your process is your process 🥰

In this week’s episode, Bianca, Carly, and CeCe are joined by emerging author, Ron, to discuss his query submission. After which, Bianca interviews NYT bestselling author, Garrard Conley, to chat about his latest novel, All the World Beside. 😍 We also have the last article in our QueryManager series, written by Morgan Strehlow. Finally, Carly shines a light on something many of us dread— creating some sort of social media presence 🥲

Don’t forget, we’ve launched a TSNOTYAW Membership Program so you can get even more The Shit No One Tells You About Writing goodness! Our podcast episodes and Friday newsletter issues will continue to go out free of charge (we *love* sharing all this amazing content with writers like you). But as TSNOTYAW has grown, so too have the many, many hours our team pours into it, and in order to be able to keep showing up for our lovely listeners, we decided to launch this exciting new venture.

For just $8USD a month or $80USD a year, you can receive our paid newsletter on Tuesdays which features weekly bonus author Q&As, exclusive content from industry experts, weekly access to Carly Watters and CeCe Lyra’s written notes on queries from the podcast’s Books With Hooks feature, monthly bonus podcast episodes, AND regular Ask Me Anythings / Q&As with Carly, CeCe, and Bianca Marais. If that doesn’t kickstart your writing journey, we don’t know what will!

Thanks for reading ❤️

The Shit No One Tells You About Writing Team

This Week’s Podcast✨🎙️✨

In this week’s 📕Books with Hooks🪝, Bianca, Carly, and CeCe are joined by Ron, to discuss his query submission. They chat about:

Ron's curiosity-inducing first query paragraph
The line between giving away too much plot and sharing just enough in a query
How subjective agents’ opinions can be
The right emotional calibration within your characters
The issue with having too many names in opening pages
The ways authors can share the socio-emotional frameworks for their characters
Balancing interiority with explanation and exposition
The difference between emotionality, interiority, and 'telling', and
The idea of putting characters in situations that will reveal the right things about them

After which, Bianca interviews Garrard Conley, professor and New York Times bestselling author of the memoir, Boy Erased. They discuss:

His fist novel, All the World Beside
The letter to the reader in the advanced copy
Gerrard's unconventional journey to the publication with Boy Erased
The role of luck in the industry
Whether Garrard had a large platform/following when he published his memoir
Subjectivity of agents and publishers
Garrard's process in writing his latest book
The benefits of researching, even when some of the information doesn't make it into the final work
The number of edits Garrard went through before he produced his final draft, and
The idea of 'jazz hands writing' versus simple emotional truth.

More information about Garrard can be found here, or you can connect with him on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook!

You can purchase All the World Beside on our Bookshop.org affiliate page here. Buying books through this link supports a local indie bookstore, as well as The Shit No One Tells You About Writing 📚❤️

The Great Beta Reader Match Up is Back 🌟😍✨

Are you looking for beta readers, some of whom might potentially become writing group members down the line?

Are you wanting to be matched up with those writing in a similar genre and/or time zone, so they can critique your work as you critique theirs at the same time?

Your manuscript doesn't have to be complete to sign up!

This particular match up will be open to registrations from now until the 31st of March, with the match up emails going out on the 1^st of April.

For more information and to register, click below:

Tell Me More!

QueryManager and Agents Who Use It: Part 3 ✨

Today is the last of our three-part series on QueryManager from literary agents who use it. We hope you learned something valuable over the last few weeks!

QueryManager Dos and Don’ts

By Morgan Strehlow

DO pay attention to who you are submitting to and why you are submitting to them. One of the helpful things QueryManager does is cut down an author's agent research time, but that doesn't mean you don't need to do additional research outside of QueryManager. Because of QueryManager, agents are saturated with more queries than we would be otherwise—and, in my experience, most of the queries are not good fits based on the agent’s MSWL. I can tell when authors know why they are querying me, and that makes me want to keep reading. When that’s not the case, it can feel like an author is throwing spaghetti at a wall to see if it sticks, and it never feels great to be the wall.

DON’T compromise quality. Whether you’re querying through e-mail or through a series of boxes on a form, the quality of your query should not change. It doesn’t need to be error- or typo-free, but it needs to be polished, professional, and reflect well on the quality of your work.

DO take advantage of the additional form spaces provided that you don't get when sending a simple query letter. Don't just copy and paste into the form boxes from your query letter paragraphs or say, "See query letter." It’s an extremely impersonal first impression for someone you hope to be your publishing partner and advocate. You're also dismissing an opportunity to help an agent get to know you and your book better. The place where I love to see additional information is in the Author Bio form.

DON’T obsess over the premium insights. I will sometimes see authors on Twitter over-analyzing the data provided to premium users, which gives them insights on where they are in an agent's queue or how many times an agent has opened their query. Personally, the order of receipt has no bearing on when I will get to reading a query. I might be holding on to a certain category of queries to read after I find my next project from another category I’m actively on the hunt for.

DON’T read too much into form rejections. As much as agents wish we could give everyone personalized responses, authors won’t always get a meaningful response with actionable feedback. Don’t take it personally, and don’t let vague feedback prompt you to make broad, sweeping changes to your manuscript because chances are, the response you received was not personal—it was a template.

Morgan Strehlow is a Pennsylvania-based literary agent at The Bindery Agency. There, she primarily works with nonfiction authors and the occasional fiction author who is telling compelling stories through the context of sport.

A Seminar With Our Very Own CeCe Lyra 😍🌟

Join CeCe for her popular online course Writing Tension: Creating Tension, Conflict, and Stakes in a Story — this time in an all-new 2-day format with an interactive component. Keep in mind this new format has limited spots, so sign up early if you’d like to secure yours!

To register, click here!

Beyond the Hashtag: Crafting a Compelling Online Presence for Authors

By: Carly Watters

Let’s talk about why I have spent my entire agenting career talking about Twitter.

Sure, we’re supposed to call it X now, but let’s go back to 2010. In 2010, after a stint as a literary agency assistant, I was starting to build my client list at PSLA. I was committed to spreading the word about myself so I could start getting queries that matched my taste. It took a year of doing interviews, blog posts and other free labour for writers to get pitches that I felt were aligning with my vision for my future client list.

Twitter was the place for journalists to go viral.
Twitter was the place all writers were supposed to be networking.
Twitter was the water cooler of the internet.
Twitter was the place where careers were made. Creatives got discovered and were eventually paid for their labour and ideas.

But eventually the data started to show: Twitter was not selling books.

And that was a problem.

This led to a 10 year industry search of discovery to figure out: how can we sell books on the internet? How can we track it? How do we publish books that people want to read and talk about in the era of social media.

Here’s where many writers are at:

You feel like showing up online is selfies and TikTok dances
You know you need to build a brand or market a book but when you go to create you have no idea where to start or how to do it, it all feels so hard
You think you do not have time to create content
You have no idea who to "be" online
You feel like you’re launching your book into silence
You think it's everyone else's job to sell your book

If this sounds like you then the good news is my course will:

Give you the tools to show up in a way that makes you feel comfortable
Provide you with a content plan to uniquely use the internet for you and your style of marketing (it will become second nature because you will know what to post, when, where, and have a bank of ideas)
Make it easy to create content because it comes from a place of authenticity and knowing the messaging you want to get out into the world
Reassure you that people are getting the words you’re putting out there into the world
You will feel confident in producing content that works for your audience and speaks to the readers who care about supporting you

If you want to learn more, sign up for my free webinar that will take you through my signature framework, the 6 modules of the program and much more:

See you March 27th for the kick off!

That’s all for this week’s news! If you enjoyed it, why not share the love? 🥰

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Until next week, happy writing! Tune in again then for more invaluable wisdom from our wonderful hosts! 😍

❤️ The Shit No One Tells You About Writing Team

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