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Got some Christmas loot you’re itching to spend? Various comics publishers and digital vendors have just what you need in the form of some tempting sales.

SEQUENTIAL, the “Criterion” of digital graphic novels is having a big sale, with more than 180 graphic novels from Fantagraphics, Top Shelf, NBM, Knockabout, and Koyama Press at 50-80% off. The list includes such 2014 best ofs as The Love Bunglers by Jaime Hernandez, Beauty by Kerascoët, How to Be Happy by Eleanor Davis, and more. Also From Hell, works by Lucy Knisley, James Kochalka, Mike Dawson and tons more good stuff. See the entire list here.

As joked above, Sequential offers its digital graphic novels with added material like commentary tracks, bonus art and more. If you got an iPad for Christmas, or just upgraded it, a stop at this sale (which goes until January 6th) is definitely called for.

Comixology is also having a bunch of sales including

A 50% off sale on Image comics published before 11/12, including Saga, Sex Criminals and 4000+ other titles. 2014 was the year of Image and if by some bizarre chance you’ve missed out on some of the great new books coming out, here’s another chance.

Comixology is also having a 50% off sale for Submit books, including the Testament Omnibus, Spike Trotman’s essential Poorcraft, minis by Becky Cloonan and Andrew Tsurumi, Aw Yeah Comics and tons more. Take a chance on something new!

Look at the size of that thing! Dark Horse is having a Star Wars farewell Megabundle sale. Just $300 gets you the entire Star Wars comics collection from Dark Horse, many of them excellent books that may never see the light of day again. As you know, starting in January, Marvel takes over the Dark Horse license and these books have been deemed not part of canon, so get ‘em while you can.

The listing doesn’t say how many pages are in this collection but there are 568 issues so its…thousands and thousands of pages of Star Wars. Good deal.

You type, “The End.”
Then, you write a fast letter to an editor and send off a couple sample chapters.

Oops!
You forgot one thing. That manuscript needs to cool off before you send it out.
It is the single, hardest thing for me to do. I do not want to wait and besides that, I KNOW the revisions I just did are fantastic and the editor will be dying to read it. Yes? No.

Sadly, I send out material before it is ready. When I wait and read something even a week later, I find so many more things to revise.

Repeated words. Subconsciously, I fall in love with this word or that and it repeated endlessly. I don’t notice this unless the mss has rested a while and then, the words stick out like pimples. My goal is to cut that repetition to a single instance. After all, a single pimple isn’t bad, it’s the allover pimple face that’s bad. Two words I constantly overuse are bit and whirl: She whirled around a bit before settling down. Not bad, until she whirls 13.5 times per chapter.

Spelling and Grammar. OK, all you grammar witches. I know you are out there, because you email me all the time. My blog posts tend to be more off the cuff and I pay for it in humiliation every time a Grammar Witch reports in. (NOTE: I LOVE you, Grammar Witch. I am yours to command. I just WISH I had your eye for detail.) My remedial Grammar Witch glasses only work well when a mss has cooled off a while. Then, things pop out at me.

Darcy, sporting slightly askew Grammar Witch Glasses.

Vague, Unsettled Dissatisfaction. It’s hard to say exactly what this is, because it varies with each manuscript. Just–something is wrong. Off. I can usually pinpoint what that is and fix it. But when I can’t do that immediately, I start analysis, such as the Shrunken Manuscript or using other tools from Novel Metamorphosis. Because I must find and fix whatever it is. Usually–there’s something and it’s not a minor something. I just can’t see it right away.

What about you? Do you let a manuscript cool off?

I’m having a submissions day. This is true: a manuscript that is only in a drawer or only a file on your computer will not sell. It’s only when you send out a manuscript to an editor that you get a contract, a sale, a publication.

Last year, I talked about reevaluating my career and the market place and how that led to a new picture book, Prairie Storms. It’s a story about a year on the prairie and how the wildlife survives the prairie storms.

Coming August, 2011

I’m excited to say that Sylvan Dell will be publishing a companion book, DESERT BATHS. This follows desert animals through a 24-hour period and shows how they take baths. The same illustrator, Kathleen Rietz will be working on this story. Look for it in 2012.

Meanwhile, a sale doesn’t mean that you STOP submitting. Here are some other tips on submissions.

1. Why Rejection Should be Your Goal
2. Are You Still Submitting Before Revising?
3. Are You Still NOT Submitting?
4. Are You Still Submitting Blind?
5. Are You Still Singly Submitting?
6. Are You Still Not Tracking Submissions?
7. The Biggest Mistake in Submitting a Picture Book
8. 8 Sources of Market Info
9. Test Submissions
10. How To Contact an Editor
11. Q&A: How Do I Find an Editor’s Name for Submission
12. 10 Ways to Deal with Rejection

NonFiction BookBlast Sunday, June 26, 2011. 8-10 am. ALA Conference in NOLA.

You Must Apply!

I always apply for grants for writers; I’ve never won a grant (though I was given a different type of award), but just going through the process is valuable. Think of it as a work-out for your submission-muscles; where would Arnold be today if he hadn’t worked out?

Audience. The process of filling out a grant application and sending it in forces a writer to think about audience. Who are you writing for, what genre? Does your work really fit that audience or are you fudging a bit?

Bravery. It takes guts to write and even more courage to send out your work over and over. The process of sending in a grant application is relatively easy, though, because you’re not competing for publication, just money that will help you write a while longer. It takes less courage to send in grant applications than to submit to a publisher. Do it.

Experimenting with new genres. The Arkansas Arts Council rotates the genre for which they give grants: novels and short stories, poetry, literary nonfiction. Guess what? I’ve submitted each time. I’ve looked ahead to see what they are looking for and worked ahead in that genre. For the poetry submission, probably one of my weaker submissions, I wrote a number of poems on a theme. While I didn’t win the grant, it gave me experience with writing a variety of poetry forms over an extended period of time. Any experience with poetry is bound to make me a better writer, right?

Discipline. Finally, the act of submitting a grant application requires discipline, something writers need more of. You must plan ahead, read and fit your work into the grant’s requirements. You must print out a mss and address an envelope. The discipline to submit is crucial to your success as a writer. Rejection doesn’t matter, as long as you can keep on submitting. Don’t JUST submit to grants programs; but don’t neglect them, either.

I’m mailing in my grant application today to the Arkansas Arts Council. Look for councils in your area and for national grants. The Poets and Writers magazine maintains one list of grants and contests.

Revise with confidence.

Graphic Novels for Kids and Teens

Are you like me? Clueless about graphic novels? Here are 15 resources to get us up to speed! To get you started, you can download free the Flu Fighter graphic novel (about the H1N1 flu) from Stone Arch/Capstone Publishers. Here are resources for writing, illustrating, reading, evaluating and submitting graphic novels.

Download FREE until January 1, 2010.

How to Write Graphic Novels

• Sara Easterly (author) and Jaime Temairik (illustrator) in a 5-part series about graphic novels, talk about the whys and hows.
• 10-part series on writing comics and graphic novels by Dennis O’Neill. “He’s best known for writing Green Lantern/Green Arrow and Batman, through the seventies, Spider-Man in the eighties and for editing Batman-related titles in the nineties. ” See all the lessons listed here.
• Complete Idiot’s Guide to Creating a Graphic Novel
  Review from ComicsBulletin.com
• 20-part series of Videos on Writing Comics and Graphic Novels from eHow. by Dan Head.
  
  Comic Books As A Visual Medium — powered by eHow.com

Reading Guides and Resources for and about Graphic Novels

• Great Graphic Novels for Teens. YALSA, the Young Adult Library Services Association arm of the American Library Association, has an annual list of Great Graphic Novels for Teens, recommended graphic novels and illustrated nonfiction for those ages 12-18, prepared yearly by YALSA.
• Top 10 Graphic Novels.
• A Graphic Literature Library.
• CCBC Graphic Novel Resources. A huge list of resources from the Cooperative Children’s Book Center from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
• School Library Journal articles on Graphic Novels.
• Graphic Novel Reporter. Reviews of new releases, interviews with authors, etc.
• The Horn Book articles on Graphic Novels.
• BroDart Resource Lis
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Introduced first in 2007, authors debuting children’s books have formed a cooperative effort to market their novels. Last year, I featured many of the stories of how the 2k8 Novels Were Revised. This is part of the ongoing stories from the Class of 2k9 authors and how they went about revising their novels.

After yesterday’s posting about when to stop revising and send in a story, J.T. Dutton’s story seemed especially appropriate. Darcy

Freaked: A Revision Story

Guest Post
by J.T. Dutton

My first book, Freaked, leapt into the world three months ago. Since then, I’ve been trying to form ideas for a short blog on revision. I’ve seized on some good thoughts for the discussion, stuff I teach in my Composition classes, ways to revise to improve sentences or arguments through better examples. I am an intense devotee of the school of write and rewrite. “Nothing is so smooth it can’t be smoother” is one of my mantras.

But when I have to talk about the revising I did on Freaked, I feel shy. I read a lot and I can think of fifty or hundred novels that I see as perfect—every sentence, word, and scene. I’d like to be a “perfect” writer too, but the fact is, I’m not. I get muddled. I have reread Freaked at least three times since it came into print, each time cringing at the number of things I would change now that I’m older and wiser. This is after revising it hundreds of times over twelve years, with the last pass conducted by some of the smartest people in the writing business—the editors and copy editors at HarperCollins.

Surgeons Don’t Get “Do Overs”

My Dad reminded me recently, when I was expressing angst about my second book, Stranded, of a quote from Albert Einstein, “perfection is the enemy of good.” My Dad is a retired surgeon. In his field, he didn’t get do-overs. He had to believe in his skills, be courageous about them. He is always stopping to offer assistance at road-side accidents. He volunteers for an ambulance service and a local fire department despite the fact that he faces liability issues as the most prepared person on the scene if something goes wrong. (This is why some doctor’s don’t stop for emergencies.)

Dad has made it a lifetime practice to do what he can, when he can. He even “vacations” every couple of years at hospital in Haiti.

Revision is a great thing, but for people like me, it can lead to obsession and excuses not to share my work. At a certain point, I have to take my dad’s advice and admit that I can’t tuck every thread, that I’m flawed, that I make mistakes, but it’s better to offer the world what skills I have than to offer it nothing at all. In this way, I guess, the writing can be interesting, individual, and courageous, rather than perfect.

A pretty worthy goal.

Thanks Dad. You are my hero.

Post from: Revision Notes Revise Your Novel! Copyright 2009. Darcy Pattison. All Rights Reserved.

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