Writing Young Adult Fiction For Dummies

by Deborah Halverson

  Bring Bookmarks or Business Cards

  Networking should be one of your primary conference goals, so come stocked with a supply of business cards (or bookmarks if you choose that format for your contact information). You’ll be making contacts who may help you down the road, if not with your current book. Sometimes you’ll make friends and form critique groups or informal manuscript exchanges.

  You may need a card for an editor or agent contact, but don’t count on it. Business cards are fairly meaningless to editors and agents at conferences. Editors and agents aren’t going to follow up with you; you’re going to follow up with them — and what they want in that follow-up is a query letter or a manuscript (both of which have your contact information), not a card.

  Don’t use your regular job-related business cards if you’re not in the writing industry; get a business card dedicated to your writing career. Make sure those cards represent you well professionally. That doesn’t mean go expensive; you can print customized cards quite cheaply, and plenty of free basic-but-still-lovely card designs are available online.

  If you’re unpublished, include your name, e-mail address, and website if you have one (omit your home mailing address). If you’re previously published or in a writers’ organization, include your book titles and organization affiliation on the card, too. (For more on business cards and other marketing tools, jump to Chapter 15.)

  Make Notes on the Business Cards You Receive

  People easily blend together in the conference-logged brain. As soon as possible after you get a card, pause to note on the back of the card the circumstances of your meeting (mutual friends, a shared enthusiasm for a speaker or genre, and so on). Slip that card into a plastic business-card sleeve in your conference notebook.

  Always make an action note on the back of the card, stating what you should do to follow up when you get home — “Read her excerpt online” or “Contact her about guest posting or guest article for newsletter.” Reinforce that networking moment with a follow-up contact.

  Another option for handling cards is to tape them onto a blank page in your conference notebook, transcribing your back-of-card notes onto the notebook page beside the card. When you get home, you can see at a glance all your action notes and then physically check them off as you work through them. Folks who maintain contacts in electronic phone books find this a useful way to keep cards from people who don’t necessarily warrant a phone book entry. For example, you may not be thinking about book trailers at all when someone mentions a great article she read about creating them, but a year later, you’re eager to try your hand at one. I met someone who told me about the best article for book trailers. I wish I could remember the article. Who told me about it? Who . . . who . . . who . . . Just flip through your notebook and there she is, right next to a note about the book trailer article.

  Save Conference Expense Receipts for Tax Records

  You can deduct writing-related expenses from your taxes as long as you’re pursuing publication and not just writing as a hobby, so keep track of your conference expenses. Save receipts for things that enhance, advance, or promote your writing career. Starting the moment you sign up, print out electronic receipts for all registration and travel, and then carry a receipt envelope around in your purse, pocket, or notebook at the conference.

  After the conference, log those expenses into your running Writing Expenses spreadsheet for that year. If you don’t have a Writing Expenses spreadsheet, start one. Writing for publication is a business even if it’s not your full-time employment. You can bet you’ll be taxed on advances and royalties as income when those come in!

  Check with your tax preparer for the most current tax rules and restrictions regarding deductions for writers. They can get pretty complicated, so have a tax expert explain the latest rules, prepare the forms for you, or instruct you regarding which forms to use. Also consult the IRS’s webpage (www.irs.gov), which has a search function to help you look up the latest articles and FAQs; use “business or hobby” and “hobby loss” as your search terms.

  Set Aside a Post-Conference Recovery Phase

  Your conference will eventually come to an end — but that doesn’t mean you’re done with it. You need to take all that information and inspiration and put it to use. You need to recoup, regroup, and then react:

  Recoup: After a conference, you’ll be mentally and probably physically wiped. Give yourself permission not to think books for a period of time, several days to a week. Reconnect with family and the real world. Exercise. If you’re up to it, read the books you bought. Faculty members’ books will be on sale at the event; buy them and study how those writers apply what they preach. But don’t let your recouping phase go on too long. You don’t want to let the inspiration slip away.

  Regroup: This is when you’ll be very very happy you took my advice about preparing your goals and using a conference notebook, because the first action you take post-conference should be reviewing all the information you collected and making your plans for moving forward:

  • Scan the margins of your conference notebook for Action Items and prioritize them.

  • Read your notes from each session. Interact with those notes, circling and highlighting to cement the points in your mind.

  • Go through your conference checklist and see whether you’ve answered all your questions and attained your goals. If not, follow up with one of the contacts you made to see whether they got the answer.

  • Make a revision checklist. List the elements of your story that you want to tackle in revision. Plan what you can do in each pass, because you won’t be able to do it all at once. (For info on negotiating stages of revision, see Chapter 11.)

  • Make a revision plan. Use your post-conference energy to its fullest, reviewing your writing schedule and seeing where you can improve or shift it. You’ll likely have heard lots of deliciously sneaky writing-time tips from fellow attendees (it’s a hot topic in conference chit-chat!). See whether any of those apply to you.

  Some writers find that the “regroup” phase is their “recoup” phase, too. Or they like to regroup before they set things aside to recoup. I’m in the latter group, preferring to organize, highlight, and strategize while it’s all still fresh and then go outside to play after the action plan is locked in. You’ll know after your first conference.

  React: This is when you take action on what you learned about your story, your writing, yourself, and your industry at the conference. Put your new tools to work:

  • Send follow-up notes and/or thank you notes. This should be the first item on your post-conference task list, because this step involves other people and is essential for reinforcing your networking connections. E-mails work just fine, unless you’re writing an agent or editor, in which case a physical note is appropriate. Keep the note simple, thanking recipients for their time and sharing their expertise, and note any personal interaction you had with them.

  • Move through the rest of the post-conference task list you created.

  • Revise any work that received requests from editors or agents. If you’re not close to submission-ready, send a note to say thanks and that you’re working on your story, and then give yourself a deadline, aiming for less than 3 months if possible. If it takes 6 months or longer, that’s fine — everyone knows successful post-conference revision takes time. Just explain the delay when the submission is ready: “I’ve been revising and feel now that it’s ready to submit to you.”

  • If there was an open invitation to all attendees to submit, do your post-conference revisions before sending your submission. You do have time, and this is your only freebie with that editor or agent. Follow the rules on any handouts or guidelines provided at the conference. Always cite the invitation in the opening paragraph of your query, and note the invitation, too, on the front of the submission envelope: “Requested Materi
al: X Conference.”

  To access the cheat sheet specifically for this book, go to www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/writingyoungadultfiction.

  Find out "HOW" at Dummies.com