Virtual Friends

One of the things we love most about writing is the entire community that opened up to us once we started researching publishing. We found websites, blogs and message boards that are dedicated to helping people exactly like us. These sites are full of writers who want to see you succeed. There isn't any sense of competition. Instead there's a feeling of shared success and excitement when you find out someone landed a stellar agent or a book deal because that means it's possible for you too.

So today's post is dedicated to the best resources for aspiring writers. These are the blogs, forums and websites that educated us enough about the publishing industry to land an agent. I'm sure you're familiar with most of them already, but just in case:

1. AbsoluteWrite - This forum is amazing. We met other writers by posting our questions and snippets of our work for critique. The patience of the more experienced members of this community is astounding.

2. Nathan Bransford's Blog - Nathan rocks. His was the first blog that came up when we started researching how to get an agent. His pragmatic and oftentimes hilarious advice for aspiring writers is essential to understanding how publishing really works.

3. QueryTracker.com - This website has contact information for thousands of agents and information on their preferences and publishing history. QueryTracker also reports agent response times, and has comments from other writers about their interactions with agents. And don't forget to check out The QueryTracker Blog and their forum. There are six aspiring and published writers who maintain this blog on a day-to-day basis. Their topics are always relevant to the average aspriring writer and they run some pretty great contests too.

4. Miss Snark's First Victim's Blog - We've said it over and over again, but every aspiring writer should enter MSFV's Secret Agent contest at least once. The feedback provided by the Secret Agent and MSFV's savvy readers is worth its weight in gold.

5. Publisher's Marketplace - Warning: This site is highly addictive and if you are in the process of querying, and you're refreshing your email every 2 seconds, they send a Publisher's Lunch email every day about deals, reviews, etc. Receiving this new email may cause a panic attack and seeing that it's from Publisher's Marketplace and not your dream agent may push you over the edge. Don't say we didn't warn you. A subscription costs $20 a month and is well worth the money. It keeps you current on all new deals and you can obsess over any books that sell that sound remotely like something your writing. It's fun. Promise.

And one last thing...

We want to thank all of you for reading and for all of your support throughout this journey. We've come a long way over the past 10 months and it's all thanks to people like you. This post over at GreyStreetGirl is such a perfect example of how this whole thing works because we never would have met Eva without the fabulous Little Miss J. And we never would have met the fab Little Miss J without the crazy girls over at Plot This.

The fact is that we would never have been able to do any of this without all of you. So thank you for reading our random thoughts and providing feedback and encouragement.