My first book pitch

Uh, no, we're not talking baseball!

Myra here. Oh. My. Talk about naive! I’ve lost count of how many conferences I attended before I had the vaguest idea of what it meant to pitch a manuscript to an editor or agent! I suspected something significant was going on when I’d notice writers sidling up to editors and shrewdly sort of segue into a short synopsis of their work-in-progress.

But seriously??? The audacity!

The first clue I had that all this sidling and segueing was de rigueur was in 2001 at my second Mount Hermon conference. As at other conferences, attendees were given the opportunity to sign up for one-on-one appointments with editors and/or agents. And, as at other conferences, my initial thought was, “And what, pray tell, would I EVER IN A MILLION YEARS have to say to such an important person???”

But that year, fortunately, I was attending the conference with the ladies in my critique group, two of whom were published and who actually knew what they were doing. I watched in silent awe as one of them approached a big-name editor from a well-known Christian publishing house and began glibly describing the premise of her book. The editor nodded with interest and invited her to submit the manuscript.

Oooookay. Pitching to an editor. You get him interested. He says send the proposal. That’s how this is supposed to work, huh?

But moi? You want ME to try this? Uh-uh, no way!

So I let another entire conference go by with little more than timid smiles at the editors whose paths I happened to cross, while hoping and praying they’d NEVER ask me to talk about my book! (No worries there. All the glib and audacious writers successfully monopolized the editors’ time. )

Fast-forward to Houston 2003, my first national American Christian Romance Writers conference. That year I had a book manuscript I actually felt hopeful about. So I swallowed my fears (well, not really) and signed up for an appointment with the editor my research had told me would most likely be interested in a story like mine.

My appointment was at 2:00 Saturday afternoon, so I had all day Friday and all Saturday morning to get really nervous. I had a list of pitching guidelines in my folder that someone had generously posted to the loop prior to the conference, and I knew the important points I should share about my story. But no way did I have an “elevator pitch” perfectly memorized! I just prayed God would give me the words I needed when the time came.

Pass the tissues, please!

Finally it was time to meet the editor. Donning my most professional demeanor, I sat down across from her and introduced myself. Then I confessed my inexperience and nervousness, after which I promptly burst into tears!

Not an auspicious first-ever appointment experience.

I’ll always be grateful for this editor’s patience and understanding. Her first instinct (a good one) was to offer me some of her peanut M&Ms. My response (a bad one) was to say, “No, thank you.” (I LOVE PEANUT M&Ms!)

Anyway, somehow I muddled through a description of the book I wanted to propose. She politely declined, saying she didn’t think it was quite what they were looking for. I thanked her, and that was that.

Bummer, huh? My first book pitch a total bust.

Not really. I’d tested the waters, broken the ice, conquered (or at least temporarily subdued) my worst fears. Next time, at least, I’d know what to expect.

Most importantly, I learned editors don’t live to rip off authors’ heads and fling them over the edge of the highest cliff. Editors (agents, too) are real people, not inapproachable luminaries enthroned on high. Most of them (in the Christian book market, anyway) are actually quite supportive and encouraging and want to see you succeed.

As for the manuscript the editor passed on, time (and lots of revisions) heals all wounds. I’m happy to say the story went on to win the 2005 RWA Golden Heart for Best Inspirational Romance Manuscript. Autumn Rains was published by Heartsong Presents in 2009, and was named a Short Contemporary Romance finalist for the 2010 Carol Award. If you’re doing the math, that was seven years after my originally unsuccessful pitch, which just proves you should never, never, never give up!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If you haven’t yet read Autumn Rains, you could win your own autographed copy of the utterly fantabulous book passed up all those years ago by a certain editor who shall remain nameless. Just mention your interest in a comment to be entered in the drawing.
 
You can also find Autumn Rains in the Barbour Publishing three-in-one collection Gateway Weddings. Three Missouri women enter the gateway to life, love, and longing. Valerie Bishop, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, is afraid to leave her home. Can ex-con Healy Ferguson show her the path to freedom? Sailor Kern is enamored of romance author Chandler Michaels. Will she fall for his lines or find a real hero in Parker Travis? Jilly Gardner has reluctantly agreed to help out her estranged foster parents. Will Cam Lane help the family heal the breach? Will these three couples be open to the plan God has for their lives—and loves?

Taking Baby Steps to Win The Race

New Year's Revolutions are nice...
but stickin' with them is a whole 'nother story!

Raise your hand...how many of you made New Year's Revolutions this year? Yes, yes, I call them Revolutions because:

Revolutions offer power.
Revolutions create change.
Revolutions unseat the unsavory.

And it all starts one step at a time.

I know the feeling. Once you've decided to do something, you want to jump in with both feet. Get right on it. See results. Right?

Wrong. FIRST, we've got to develop a plan or after a week of exuberance, all that high-octane energy is going to burn off and you'll be left with nothing but the fumes.

Think about it. You want to get in physical shape, a very common New Year's Revolution. There are many options open to you:

Diet. You've decided 10 pounds have got to go. So you've heard the new "red beet and soda water" diet melts away the pounds without any effort. After one day - maybe two - of eating nothing but beets and washing it down with water, you scrunch your nose at the nonsense and run to the nearest Cold Stone for a double scoop of chocolate fudge ice cream and chow down instant comfort. Where did the enthusiasm for instant slimming beauty get you? Probably an extra 2 pounds before your taste buds forgave you.

Better idea. FIRST, instead of overdosing on grapefruits, or floating away on Slim-Fast, why not try a sensible eating regime that not only cares for your health, but you might also find sustainable with minimum effort. Personally, I'm partial to Weight Watchers (I just re-upped my commitment), but there are many other excellent plans available that will help you reach any goal you set. You will have learned sound eating habits and developed a cooking routine that will keep you in that size-whatever, along with a huge smile on your face.

Exercise. You've had enough couch-potatoing over the holidays. It's January 1 and you've decide it's time to get up and move. You slap on your sneakers, fill a water bottle, grab your iPod and out the door you run. Five miles later, you crawl back into the house, exhausted, dehydrated, and pooped, but you finished the course. The next day, you can barely get out of bed, much less do any sneaker slapping and revisit that five miles again. Muscles sore, knees aching and heart rate jitterbugging like a 60's dancer, you've just set yourself back further on the workout chart than you started. Definitely not a pretty picture.

Better idea. FIRST, learn warm up exercises to stretch and condition those underused muscles before you sprint off down the road. Maybe consider jogging around the block for a couple of sessions and slowly expanding your distance each day or two. How about researching your options and mixing it up? Jogging 3 times a week, weight training once a week, aerobics squeezed in as able. Match your strengths and your weaknesses with a balanced program and soon you'll be in the rhythm that just comes naturally.

Okay, now that we've explored the obvious New Year's Revolutions, let's explore the Writers' Revolutions.

Niche. Can you believe all the hype over vampire novels? Oh my goodness, they're selling like wax teeth at a Halloween store. So, you're about 40,000 words into a delightful Amish - western - timetravel you're targeting for ABC Publishers...the SAME publishers contracting the hot vampire thing!! Your blood starts pumping and pulse racing. You don't want to miss this opportunity to get your book in front of an editor while the genre is hot. Your mind starts spinning. How about exchanging vampires for the H/H, relocating it to a quiet east coast town and dropping in a couple of aliens for conflict? How hard can that be? All the rest of the book can remain the same, right? You start tweaking, revising, changing, massaging what was once a perfectly good Amish-western-timetravel and what do you have to show for it? Tears, crumpled paper, a melted hard drive and frustration beyond measure.

Better idea. FIRST, never chase after markets unless you have the voice and love for it. Readers can tell. Take a deep breath. All popular genres are cyclical. If you have a love for Back To The Future Amish Style, then that's what you need to write. Write it well. Write it carefully. Write what's on your heart, not the plot-of-the-week. As you follow your heart and your voice, you'll develope style and your brand. Your heart will be your book.

Speed. Book in a Week (BIAW). National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). One thousand words in one hour (1K1HR). Can you image how many books you could pump out if you scramble all the techniques together? With the excitement generated by the New Year high of get'er done, we gobble up every opportunity to rack up those words and fill those pages. 10-20-30K in a week....and then our minds - and harddrives - explode.

Ewwww.

Better idea. FIRST consider what each of the above challenges means to your writing. All three incentives are excellent in themselves. They are tools to help you succeed, but like every practical tool, they have a specific function to serve in order to be useful. How do you prepare to write? Think about the time you have and how your mind works and pursue the most sustainable course.

Do you like mapping out your book from beginning to end, defining your major plot points, crafting your black moment until you see HEA in sight? Then consider preparing for NaNoWriMo. You'll have the skeleton of a well thought out book in front of you and NaNo encourages a goal of 50K in a month-just enough to reward you with a nice rough draft.

Do you need to snatch time where you can find it? Check out the 1K1HR on Facebook. Spur of the moment writing...1000 words in one hour. Great for getting your creative juices flowing and immersing in your work. And I'm sensing there's a whole lot of fun going on, too : )

Want something inbetween? Book In A Week is just long enough to help you focus your efforts to write over any hump you might be stuck on.

I could go on and on, but really, you get the picture, right?

The new year brings us endless possibilities to fulfill our dreams. God planted the seed of desire to write in us while we were still in the womb, is there any doubt we will be successful? NO. But we do need to be wise in our choices, both for our physical well-being and our creative.

Frustration leads to dead ends. Don't overwhelm yourself. Set a course and stick to it. First things first.

This is a new year...make it work for you!!

Share an over-exhuberant moment with us and then tell us how you might have prepared for it FIRST to be included in a drawing for a surprise package announced in the Weekend Edition. It can be writing related or just a fluke of life. Let's have some fun!

The First Money I Ever Made WRITING!

I still remember so vividly the first sale. It wasn’t a full length novel. It was a Christmas play. For which I earned the princely sum of $75. I was ecstatic.

I fully advise anyone seeking publication to consider shorter forms of writing as a way to earn a bit of money, build a resume and affirm that you’re not wasting your life!!!

For years I was the director of my very small church’s Sunday School Christmas Program. Our Sunday school needed material that (I learned this term) was broadly graded.

What broadly graded means is, I needed a skit or play or something that I could use for about two dozen kids ages 18 to 3.

Bigger parts for the high schoolers, short one liners for the younger elementary kids. Standing around in silence for the 3 and 4 year olds…who might abandon their post and go sit with Mommy at any moment.

Well, it was hard to find. REALLY hard to find. Add to that, I had no budget…translation: I had to pay for anything I found, any costumes we needed, any special set…myself.

Of all these challenges finding a good play was the hardest. Keep in mind here that there was little or no internet back then. The internet existed -- Al Gore had already invented it -- but I didn’t have it in my home. There was no Amazon (to my knowledge anyway). I had to go somewhere (I live a looooooooooong way out in the country) find some store that carried such things as Sunday School Christmas Plays and start digging through them.

So, I ended up writing them myself. I won’t go into the stress of that. The worry (yeah, I know, worry isn’t Christian….so I’m not only having to write the program myself…I’m a stinking sinner while I’m fretting over it! Great!)

Well, wait a minute, let me go into the stress of it for a second after all. I’d start writing the play about six months early and at that point I’d start worrying. By the time the play would go off at Christmas time, I had the whole thing memorized. It would run endlessly through my head. It fed my insomnia like little else…the only thing I can remember being as bad was the few years I coached softball when my daughters were young. Guess what? Softball????? Me??? Mary 'Klutzy Couch Potato' Connealy???? We lost a LOT of games. I lost a LOT of sleep. Insomnia is my default reaction to anything (and sometimes NOTHING)

Back to the play…I’d rewrite and revise, kids would show up at the last minute, you know---kids that belonged to our church whom I’d forgotten existed. And yet here they’d come, sometimes showing up for the Sunday of the Christmas program for the first time, wanting a part in the play.

So, anyway, I wrote a new play every year for about ten years. And when I finally quit--at the urging of my cardiologist and psychiatrist and the straight jacket repair squad--I had a nice little body of work.

So, one Sunday--the week after the program--which was a delightful play called Clashing Symbols that had a sing-song chant reminiscent of The House That Jack Built--this sweet little old lady in our church asked me if I’d ever tried to get my plays printed. The lady worked for our local newspaper, the smallest of small down weeklies. But still, that's the publishing industry, right? I thought she might KNOW STUFF. When she said that, a light bulb came on. I’d never once considered that I could try and get my plays published. I’d been trying to get my BOOKS published but never my plays.

So, by now I had the internet at home. I started hunting for publishing companies for Christmas Program plays and I found two of them. I tidied up my play (took out individual children’s names and put in CHARACTERS, stuff like that) and sent it in AND THEY BOUGHT IT!!!!!!!!!!!!

I’m getting chills writing this (of course it’s kinda cold in here, but still!!!!)

It was a wonderful moment.

Anyway, I went up to that sweet little old lady in church and told her, “It worked! Thank you so much! Thanks to you I got my play published!” (insert Kermit the Frog Dancing here)

And she said, “I’m a bit deaf and couldn’t hear the play, and I just wanted you to print up a copy for me so I could figure out what was going on.”

(insert extended dead silence broken only by the sound of crickets chirping)

They say God works in mysterious ways. And in this instance, I believe not even Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, teamed up with Nancy Drew and Sam Spade could’ve seen that coming!

Christmas Treasures
by Mary Connealy et al

I dug out four more of my plays (I couldn't find any more) and got them published, too. (These four went in a bigger book called Christmas Treasures and they’re still available on Amazon).

I don’t really recommend you buy them and stage your own original Mary Connealy play. Some of the plays are………a little sarcastic. (I know, you're shocked!) I’d hate to see your church split over them. Also the book costs a FORTUNE. Twenty-five bucks for a ten year old book currently ranked 2 millionth on Amazon? Get over yourself and put it on sale already.

And that is the heartwarming story of how deafness launched my career. How insomnia made me what I am today and (sniffle) how I earned my first money as a writer. I should have distributed tissues before I told you that poignent tale.

Hope your New Year is blessed and full of fun and joy and wonderful FIRSTS.

And since this is the first blog day (it's January second, I know, shut up) of the first week of the first month I'm giving away the first Seeker prize of 2012.
A fifteen dollar Amazon gift card.
I've got some copies of that book with the FIRST play in it kicking around, too, if anyone wants one. Heaven knows I'm not gonna use them again.
I got a note from my cardiologist and retired right before writing and directing that play killed me!!!!