The Price of Being Broke

I'm broke. And yet I'm still sending materials to potential publishers. When I say I'm broke, I mean it, though I sort of mean it in a technical sense that my checking account really wouldn't have anything in it if I didn't keep removing money from my savings account, which is now 50% of what it used to be, much to my utter dismay. But what can I do? I'm trying to work on as many projects as possible. Luckily I have a big payday coming up due to all those projects. That'll help immensely.

So what is the price of everything?

#10 envelopes: $0.98

9x12 manilla envelopes: $1.97

Pack of 20 Forever stamps: $8.80

Printer paper: $3.88

Getting an agent to take on your manuscript: Priceless

Of course, that last part hasn't happened yet, so I'm still just burning cash. Whoohoo! But there's really no way around it. I still email agents if I can, unless it looks like snail mail would get a better response, though there isn't really a better response when it comes to rejection. Rejections are what they are no matter how you query. But if an agent will take pages through snail mail and just a query in email, then I'll opt to send them pages instead, just so they can at least see the work I'm presenting instead of having to guess whether or not they'd even want to look at it through the query letter.

Don't get me wrong - that makes it sound like my query letter isn't up to par, but considering I've had one agent comment on it as of late, and was asked to send a partial during my first round of querying, I must have done something right in it. Still, I'll opt for pages any day of the week.

So what's the current count you may wonder? I'm not sure if I ought to post this or not, but I doubt any agent is going to bother looking at my little bloggy and rejections don't necessarily mean anything (every author has rejections under his or her belt - even big names like J.K. Rowling, Stephen King, and a whole mess of others), so I will.

My current numbers are:

Rejections: 12
Partial Requests: 1
Acceptances: 0 (obviously)

Still combing through agents to decide who to send to and who might enjoy my work, etc. etc. It's a long road ahead though I'm sure. Keeping my fingers crossed!

Envelopes and papers and clips, oh my!