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A New Witch is a Middle Grade novel by Doug McIntire. It's a story about a young girl who mysteriously receives a Book of Shadows and begins her quest to become a witch.
This book, and others, have taught me that writing a book is perhaps the easiest part of becoming an author. There is the initial writing of the novel, not to be underestimated, and then there is the editing, also an enormous task. But those can all be done in the privacy of your own home, without bothering anyone. But that's only the beginning of the process.
The next step, normally, is to get an agent to represent you. This can be accomplished in one of several ways. You can send cold query letters to agents and agencies, hoping to garner the interest of one who wants to see what it is you have to offer. The query process requires a query letter and a synopsis. Considering that this is all a prospective agent sees, that means they are judging you and your work on these two pieces, not on the manuscript that you have just labored untold hours over.
Another method of getting an agent is to attend agent conferences. I'm lucky enough to have a large Agent and Editors Conference hosted annually right here in Austin, Texas by the Writers' League of Texas. I have attended the last three years, but I've only been pitching A New Witch for the last two years — more on this in a bit.
Once you get an agent, then it becomes their job to get your book in front of editors, the folks at publishing houses — large and small — who are responsible for acquisitions. They are the person responsible for purchasing books for their house to publish. This is a daunting task. Consider that 90% of the books they purchase are losing propositions. Most of the other 10% make money, and hopefully, 1 or 2 books make a lot of money, enough to cover the expenses of all the losing books. It's a heck of a business model.
So where is A New Witch in this process? That's part of the the purpose of this website; to track the updates and the progress on my quest to get A New Witch published.