Day 3: The Who

You might have noticed that my blog ended rather abruptly, yesterday. I spilled lemonade on my laptop. Yeah, bummer, huh? Fortunately, it was not terminal – for the laptop, I mean, but it almost gave me a heart attack.

I had another crazy brainstorming idea while I was gone. All aspiring writers have rejection letters. Those one or two sentences can be very painful, but they are universally dull – at least in my experience. They range from the extreme of "no comment," after waiting three months to hear SOMETHING, through "the project is not right for us," to "you need a huge platform to sell this." It might be fun to collect rejection letters. Twice a year we could vote on the most creative one and award the winning agency/publisher an
"R" (a rejection letter) – pun intended. If we have no creative rejection letters submitted to the community, then we could hold a creative rejection letter-writing contest instead.

A community blog takes a lot of teamwork. The volunteers who commit to writing regularly on a topic in which they are skilled will be part of The 897 Regulars. Some of the talents the community will need: writers in these (and other) genres, cookbooks, travel, academic, devotional, narrative, memoire, biography/autobiography, journalistic, humor, (Please, help me, here! Add some non-fictional genres to the comments.) and experts in building platforms, writing queries, researching, interviewing, marketing, creating blogs and building a following, designing and using web sites, staying motivated to write, editing and self-editing, language usage, and publishing/self-publishing.

Other members of The 897 Regulars will be the volunteers who keep facebook, twitter, and other social network communities updated with the community blog news and those who manage the sidebar extras that we create for the right-hand column of the blog.

Today marks the first time any 897 Community content goes up on the blog. Two agencies who specialize in representing non-fiction work, Daniel Literary Group and Martin Literary Management become the first two members of the N-F A-List. If you know of any agencies that specialize in non-fiction representation and you have researched them thoroughly enough to recommend them to others, please either email me at lynndaell[at]live[dot]com or leave a comment.