Important Things (including a contest)

Contest Alert! 

Taryn Albright, who is quickly becoming my favorite teenager (only she's 19, so soon she'll be all old and stuff) is an agency intern and an editor for Teen Eyes, an awesome editorial service where you can get experienced, intelligent teenagers from your target audience to critique your YA manuscript. They also do FREE query critiques (though if too many of us reveal our desperation for review, they might be forced to change that policy) AND Taryn is having a contest this week (ending tomorrow, Wednesday, July 25th). If you enter the contest you are guaranteed a free query crit. If she likes your query the best, you'll win a 10-page critique.

Did I mention she's an agency intern? So she, like, knows a good query when she sees one? Unlike some people who like to blog about queries but only know how NOT to write them?

She's also going to break down the good query on her blog. How's THAT for awesome?

Also, while she critiques queries, she's started doing #querycrits on Twitter, which is all 10 kinds of awesome. You definitely want to follow her.

Poll Results

Okay, so this isn't all that important, but just for the heck of it, I'll tell you that I got 3 votes to continue my How NOT to Write a Query series, 2 votes from people who want to volunteer their own queries, 3 who said they would help, only 1 who won't be reading them (we'll miss you), and absolutely no one was honest enough to tell me I'm up in the night to be dispensing query advice.

My current plan is to critique a query once a month (even those who like the series didn't think I should do TOO much of it). For more information, please see my newly added tab at the top of the page for all your How NOT to Write a Query resource needs.

The Kiss of  Stranger

This week only, Sarah M. Eden's awesome Regency romance The Kiss of a Stranger, is on sale for $2.99 on Amazon. I've only read one of her books so far, but I'm determined to read them all because 1) she's such an awesome researcher, I interviewed her about research for Authors' Advisory--so we know she has her details right; 2) she's absolutely hilarious in real life; 3) the one book I read was soooo good (which, let's face it, is the only really important consideration).



You gonna join the contest? Submit your query for future editions of HNTWAQ? Buy Sarah's book? Good for you.