The Contest Winners Are
“The ideal book will entice readers with something new—new characters, new plot, new outcome, a sense of urgency, or even an unexpected look at a familiar topic.” ~~B. Lynn Goodwin
Scintillating Starts with Promise
The publishing world is constantly changing. Today’s agents are looking for books they can sell to publishers, and the publishers are looking for books that offer that will grab the public and convince them that it’s a must-read.
The ideal book will entice readers with something new—new characters, new plot, new outcome, a sense of urgency, or even an unexpected look at a familiar topic. Agents look for books that are skillfully, cleverly, and clearly written. Bottom line: Can the book be successfully marketed to a large audience or most of the members of a narrower audience?
We’ll be publishing one piece a week for the next four weeks.
CL Olsen’s Under the Desert Sky is available today.
Jessey Valentine’s I Accept You as You Are will be added on October 8.
Mi West’s Sky Riders will be added on October 22.
Alison Lloyd’s Fortune on the Line will be added on October 29.
If you have insights, thoughts, or reactions to share with the authors, please put them in the Contact Box and I’ll see that your response is forwarded so you can correspond directly with the author if s/he writes back.
@@@
EDITOR’S NOTES: The first paragraph gives us action and as an AGENT I know I’d read more. The second paragraph takes me back to scenes I’ve seen in movie and sets the era. Because I care about the narrator, I’d ask to read a few more pages to see how you establish it, but as an AGENT I’d probably mention that readers will want to know what she wants ASAP. To your credit it was there in the first five pages. BTW, there’s some lovely phrasing that boosts the story.
Fortune on the Line
By Alison Lloyd
Chapter One
Central Telephone Exchange, Melbourne
September 1888
‘Hold the line, please —’
Amaryllis Price had the world at her fingertips, waiting to be connected. This was her patch of the bustling city — a wood panel, with four squares of twenty-five brass sockets each. One hundred telephone lines per operator. She clicked the cable jack into Line 323, Runting and White, real estate agents.
Over a long shift, she felt like Rapunzel, upstairs in her tower. Only it wasn’t hair that flowed over the Exchange balcony and linked the operators to the world, but a great braid of cables. The currents of the city crackled through those wires. News, gossip, love, power and money — especially money — surged from office to office to friend to bank. Boardrooms and bedrooms — the telephone Exchange was wired into the secrets of Melbourne’s rich and powerful.
If an operator chatted or eavesdropped, management docked her pay. Ryll was loathe to lose a single shilling. A bit of paper with an address was folded in her pocket. It crinkled, deep in the serge folds of her skirt, when she twisted to link a cable. Ryll was heading to see the house for sale in lunch break, with the supervisor’s permission.
Miss P. watched from the desk in the middle, through goggly steel-rimmed glasses. Beatrice, on Board 5, claimed the spectacles gave Miss P. the power to see through solid objects. The back of her head included. The Exchange girls called her the Panopticon, for her superhuman vigilance. To lose Miss P.’s goodwill this morning would be daft.
Ryll’s co-worker Maud hovered at the next panel, a grey-brown shadow in the corner of her eye. While Ryll sat on a stool, Maud always stood, to be on hand to help. She was quick and scuttling as a mouse. She’d been there since the opening of the first Exchange, longer than anyone. She thought she knew better than anyone.
‘You’re lucky to have this job,’ she’d said on Ryll’s first day. Her brief smile showed a row of small teeth before her lips crimped shut. Too neat and too clever.
Ryll didn’t need to be told she had a good job at the Exchange. For women’s work, it was technical and prestigious. Better than selling teapots or buttons.
@@@
Alison Lloyd writes thoughtful, immersive historical fiction. She loves old things – buildings, books, art and clothes – and the stories behind them. A Fortune on the Line will be her first novel for adults, after several children’s books. Find more of her fiction and history at www.alisonlloydauthor.com.
@@@
West Sky Riders
By Mi West
Chapter 1. A Few Avengers
Editor’s Notes: The urgency in this should keep an agent reading. In only 3 paragraphs there’s a lot to unpack and we get a good sense of where the narrator is and what might be at stake.
I barely remember him. An enigmatic shadow in the sky, disclosed by neither enemy radar nor posterity.
***
He gunned the throttle. The Merlin engine sung a tremolo of magic, through a tight loop in darkness. Shots passed right below him. He didn’t notice if he had touched the clouds. Judging from some smell of exhausts, the loop took him close behind; he fired a flare into the dark, and saw he now was on a perfect pursuit curve just above the attacker.
“Here we go, Mom. Tally Ho!” he whispered, aiming. Instead of the recommended four hundred yards, he went as close as a hundred and pulled the trigger; it was a reflex. Holding his breath, he sensed the kickback as his eight guns fired, and the inner kick while blasts and smithereens, from what used to be wings, outshone the flare. Blaze snaps counted as hits, back at base after night sorties. In case this one wouldn’t kill, the dark icy waves below would.
@@@
Mi West is a Runner-up in the Nature Contest, Tiferet, WriterAdvice, Dave’s Travel Corner, AdirondackReview, Chautauqua, NewMillennium-2023. “The Horn” is in Exsolutas ThrivingAnthology 2024. He appeared i.a. in JJM, Electronic Encyclopaedia of ExperimentalLit. The nephew of WWII-underground spy working for London, Mi sabotaged Russian communications when only fifteen. A member of the PragueWriters’ Group, Czechia, he´s often in Scandinavia.
@@@
Editor’s notes: I understand the narrator’s feelings that the old dog cannot be replaced. The narrator’s thoughts are so immediate that I’m drawn in immediately.
“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.” – Kahlil Gibran
I Accept You As You Are
By Jessey Valentine
Shit! Sylvia had fifteen minutes. She’ll be here by eleven o’clock. She scrubbed the kitchen counters with disinfecting wipes — one more time — but kept seeing dust specks she’d missed. As the morning light shifted, she watched as the particles floated onto clean counters. She was losing the battle. She double-checked her list: 1) scrub toilet, 2) wipe sink, 3) shine faucet. I hate water spots. 4) sweep the floor/wipe down by hand. Mops do a lousy job. The Army taught her that.
She took one more glance around her apartment and exhaled. The sweat beaded on Sylvia’s scalp and dripped down the side of her face. She wiped it dry with the back of her hand, feeling the smoothness of her freshly shaven head. One day, I might let it grow, she mused. She rubbed away the streaks on the bathroom mirror while the smell of cleaning solution filled the air. Clean.
Sylvia could never replace Trigger. The massive void he left still influenced each decision she made. Initially adamant about not getting another dog, how could she ever have the bond she had with Trigger? She closed her eyes, imagining him there. She could still feel Trigger’s soft coat, rubbing him with her feet when she sat at the table. He was so soft, a luxurious way to start the new life he gave her. Trigger was her rock. This decision felt forced. She did it to herself; she couldn’t handle animals being discarded because they were an inconvenience. “The flyer said, “FREE.”
@@@
Author Bio: Brendalyn Bilotti is a Debut Novelist, a professional Homeland Security Consultant Registered Nurse, former Army Medic, and Search and Rescue Dog handler writing under the pseudonym Jessey Valentine. Prior publications in industry-specific publications as a subject matter expert in high-risk medicine.
@@@
Editor’s notes: This right agent will recognize the clear sense of urgency, the descriptive language, and the vulnerability expressed when the narrator needs help. As a reader, what do you think might happen next?
Under the Desert Sky
Written by CL Olsen
Chapter One
Now I was pounding. Please God, let someone hear me. Both fists hit the heavy door one more time before turning to run down the massive stone steps. I had to find another way. I paused just long enough to glance up into a sky lit with a billion stars. No light pollution in the middle of an Egyptian desert. Please help me, I prayed.
Maybe another door? I followed the stone path around the ancient building, pausing briefly at some crumbling steps that led to a basement door. No, no, not here. Only hundreds of ancient human skulls resting down there. There must be other doors. I continued in the dim moonlight, finding my way through a side garden to the back of the building, and up some steps to another door. “PLEASE SOMEONE! OPEN THE DOOR! I NEED HELP!” My hands stinging as I continued my relentless pounding. But no one heard me. The monks sleeping deep inside were lost in their own dreams.
@@@
C.L. Olsen is the author of the memoir The Home for Friendless Children, the winner of fourteen literary awards including first place for non-fiction at Killer Nashville, and Distinguished Favorite at the New York City Big Book Awards.
She lives with her husband Rob in a little white cottage on Lake Erie in Michigan.
Want to share your compliments/comments with an author? Post it here and I’ll ask the author to check this page, or send it to me and I’ll forward it to her/him. Positive feedback is a bouquet for writers.