Thursday, April 28, 2011

Well that was a pain

I set up this blog a while back under my real name, since that's what I was originally using to query agents. Now that I'm using a pen name, I had to change it all to Kraft. I thought just changing the blog address would be enough, but it turns out as long as it was associated with my real Gmail address, the real name was still showing places. So, I had to make a new Google account with my pen name's email (which isn't a Gmail account) and do some blog admin rotating to get it associated here. then I realizes my FeedBurner was also set to the old name, so I ended up deleting that feed completely and setting up a new one with the new name. Whew. I guess I better hope this name sticks, because I don't want to have to go through all that again!

Mostly, this post is to test the new FeedBurner. And to vent a wee bit. :)

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

And the journey begins...

Time to dust off the ol' blog. It's been almost a year since I was first trying to land a literary agent for one of my novels, and I'm a little embarrassed at how quickly I caved in and gave up the fight. I like to think I'm not a quitter, but in this case, I was discouraged early on after reading so many agent blogs about how sick they were of getting queries on vampire novels. Well, vampires is what I usually write about, and they're in the book I was shopping around, so I decided to quit querying for the time being and see if either I could polish up my non-vampire book and try it, or wait a while and see if the vampire craze died down enough that interest might be renewed.

Well, patience has never been my strong suit. It didn't help that my novel takes place in 2012 and is centered around the centennial of the Titanic disaster. When I originally wrote it, that milestone was still years away, but now here we are just past the disaster's 99th anniversary, and my little novel is getting dangerously close to being outdated. Given how long it takes for a traditional publisher to get a new book out, I realized that even if I were to start querying again, get lucky enough to land an agent, then get lucky enough to quickly land a publisher, it would probably be much more than a year before my book saw a bookshelf anywhere. So I started researching self-publishing.