How to Publish Your Novel: A Five Part Series

We are delighted to welcome back national bestselling author Scott Oden, to conduct a special five-part series that will guide you through the process of publishing a novel. The first session is Sunday, March 6.

All sessions in the series are free and open to the public. No registration is required.  All sessions will be from 2-4 pm in the Main branch's second floor events room, on the five consecutive Sundays from March 6 through April 3.   Please contact Luisa with any questions about this series at lmorenilla [at] hmcpl [dot] org

Series Agenda:

March 6, Session One -- The Basics: This will cover basic industry terminology, handling word count issues, manuscript editing and formatting, the importance of having a "First Reader", and the psychological effects of putting one's self out there (including the Three P's: Perseverance, Persistence, and Professionalism).

March 13, Session Two -- The Market: This session will cover the basics of market research, from how to find agents and publishers to how to decipher their submission guidelines, the importance of knowing your genre, available resources, how to avoid getting scammed, and a discussion on self publishing, vanity publishing, print-on-demand (POD) technologies, and ebooks against the backdrop of a commercial writing career.

March 20, Session Three -- The Query: This will cover all aspects of the writer's basic self-marketing tool: the query letter.  How to draft one, formatting requirements, examples of good and bad queries, electronic queries, and what happens when a query reaches an agent's office or inbox.  Participants should work on their own queries between sessions.

March 27, Session Four -- The Synopsis: the fourth session will cover the art of crafting a book's synopsis, which is integral to the submissions process.  Participants will learn how to format the synopsis, how to compress material, examples of good and bad synopses, and why they are so necessary to the publication process.

April 3, Session Five -- The Submissions Package:  Finally, participants will learn to put the query, synopsis, and sample chapters together in a package, what happens when submissions are received by agents, and what happens after the submission . . . the art of being graceful in the face of rejection or, ideally, what happens when a writer is accepted.