I know. Writers always have to do kitchy-catchy things with words. Thus the above title. My sincere apologies for not being able to resist.
But. WriteOnCon was huge for me last year. I almost missed it altogether, but a writer friend of mine happened to post on Facebook that she was getting ready for a dedicated day of WriteOnCon participation. I had just "finished" (and I use that term loosely because now I know that "finished" is relative) both of my manuscripts and I was gearing up for a big push with queries. A brief peek at WriteOnCon and I knew I had found the perfect launch pad. Without a moment to spare, I jumped right in.
I played with and posted a few queries of my own and got some great feedback. I thoroughly enjoyed paying it forward by helping others with theirs and celebrated (not without envy) when fellow attendees caught the eye of the ninja agents.
But the absolute most important gift I received from WriteOnCon was that it led me to Twitter. A lot of the aspiring authors I connected with via WriteOnCon were also on Twitter. If I remember correctly, there was even an entire chat line-thing about why writers need to join Twitter.
I've said before that the entire query process is like shooting arrows into a dark room and trying to hit a bullseye. But utilizing social media, and most especially Twitter to help with the query process, is like turning on the light. And while Twitter was initially way out of my comfort zone, with Twitter, I found new agents. With Twitter, I found a supportive community of writers who shared my same crazy dream of getting published. With Twitter, I found hashtags like "#tenqueries" and "#MSWL". I could follow agents I was thinking about querying. And more than once, I even unfollowed an agent because they were rude and disrespectful and I couldn't imagine myself working with them...no matter how bad I wanted my dream of publication to come true.
But even more important than anything else, I found my agent. My agent happened to see a pitch I posted in a Twitter pitch contest, @HRNorrod's #adpit to be exact. The rest is history (but still in the making of course -- this whole path to publication takes awhile.)
Thanks @writeoncon, for being one of the lights that aspiring hopefuls like me can turn on, in order to take a little bit better aim at that bull's eye.
