Dear Kim, Did we really just get to spend the entire weekend together? Thank you very much, SCBWI! Two days of writerly quality time with my writing BFF was amazing. And while I'd like to say the THEME of the weekend was friendship, it seems the hunt for competition took over as top topic for the weekend. No not this kind of competition: More like: We spent the weekend looking for THE competition. Our competition. Well, our book's competition in the marketplace. For the querying author it is important to know what books your story will compete with for a reader's attention (and marketing $$$). During our last Novel Nuts & Bolts class with Empire Literary agent, Carrie Howland we talked about developing research skills to find our competition in the marketplace as well as how to research comparison books that convey the tone and/or the theme of our stories. Let's slice into those research skills one at a time. "I GET T...
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I met Kimberly Sabatini at the NY SCBWI Conference this year. She's fun, she's young, she loves life, and she's the author of the YA novel, Touching the Surface. You were a teacher, right? What came first, the teacher or the egg, er, I mean writer? The teacher came first, before the act of being a writer, but not before the desire to be one. The truth is, I never believed myself capable of being something so mysterious and wonderful as a legitimate writer. Contemplating a writing career was like asking if I wanted to grow up and be a unicorn tamer some day. It didn ’ t feel possible. But teaching was something very familiar—I’d spent my whole life in classrooms observing the job and the people who did it. I don’t mean it to sound as if I didn’t love being a teacher. I loved those kids like crazy and I was particularly good at working with kids with behavioral challenges, but I’m not sure I would have chosen that profession ...