August 15, 2020 Tweet
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AUGUST SPEAKER PRESENTATION
Write That Query: How to Pitch to Magazines, Agents, and Publishers
by Tish Davidson
Query first. Those words bring many writers to a standstill. Writing a good query is the first step in selling your story to a magazine or your book to an agent or publisher. But what goes into a query? How long should it be? How is querying a magazine different from querying an agent or a publisher? What are the similarities between fiction and nonfiction queries? Is there ever a time when you shouldn’t query first?Fremont resident Tish Davidson never intended to become a writer. Growing up in Lansdowne, Pennsylvania, she wanted to be a polar bear. That didn’t work out, so she became a biologist. But after earning a bachelor’s degree from the College of William and Mary and a master’s degree from Dartmouth College, she discovered that it was more fun to write about other people’s research than work in a lab. Since then, she has written everything from restaurant reviews to biology textbooks, including 10 nonfiction books for school-age children published by Scholastic and Mason Crest, and four nonfiction books for adults published by ABC-CLIO. Her shorter work can be found in anthologies by Harlequin, Adams Media, Scribes Valley Publishing, and Medusa Press. Her book, The Vaccine Debate, has been sold in 14 countries. What You Need to Know About Diabetes was published in July, and her current project is Medical Firsts that Changed the World.
AUGUST THINK TANK
Characters Caught in Complexity
led by Don Neeper
“I see society as a large number of people interacting by nonobvious social rules, like schooling fish or flocking starlings. Such ‘complex systems’ display emergent properties like the flocking, properties that are not like the behavior of a single member, one bird. I find this useful when considering a story arc in which a character faces a large development that seems to arise by itself, like group polarization or a neighborhood culture.”About Don: After a Ph.D. in physics, military service, and post-doctoral research, Neeper spent a career at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the mountains of northern New Mexico. In the last decade, Neeper invested his spare time bringing data to oppose the dumping of toxic oilfield wastes on the grasslands. A long-time public speaker and author of newspaper articles, Don is currently marketing his literary mystery set in the clash of the oil, ranching, and intellectual cultures of New Mexico.
Geri Spieler‘s