So, Sarah Z, When Can I Read Your Book???

I sent an email out to the 30 (THIRTY!!!!) friends and family members who read some or all of my book and helped me rework it and encouraged me to finish the bastard. I’m so overwhelmed with gratitude. I had NO idea what I was getting into years ago when I was like, “Maybe it would be cool to write a book.” Idiot child. Thirty-five year-old idiot child. Anyway, it’s certainly taken a village to get the manuscript and me to this point.

So…what point are we at? In the past few months I’ve changed the title (now “GOOD WOMAN” was previously “Live, Fully-Dressed Girls”) and rewritten most of it, including making the beginning more urgent and exciting. Between that and a solid query letter, it’s getting some attention from literary agents. I have now sent it out to 25 agents. Of those, I’ve received NO’s from 5 and “ooh, let me read more’s” from 3. The rest so far are crickets. That’s normal.

It’s typical that authors send their best draft effort out to 100 agents or more before getting one who wants to represent them. Should that happen, there will likely be more revisions with the agent and THEN she will pitch the book to editors at publishing houses- if one of them wants to buy it (or, you know, many of them want it and it starts a whole bidding war and I end up a millionaire being interviewed by Oprah), then there will be another round of edits and THEN they’ll be pushing it out into online and physical bookstores. SO, most optimistically, there’s probably another year before GOOD WOMAN will see the light of day…and…