if I keep writing I've had more practice every book that I write is better than the last book that I wrote I've learned something new welcome to queries qualms and quirks the weekly podcast that asks published authors to share their successful query letter and discuss their Journey from first Spark to day of publication I am your host author Sarah Nicholas and literary agent Sarah and Fisk Chelsea Mueller writes gritty twisty fantasy and Thriller novels for adults and teens she is best known for
The yalsa Reluctant reader pick prom house and her gritty Soul charmer urban fantasy series she loves bad cover songs good fight scenes and every soapy why a drama Netflix can put in her queue Chelsea lives in Texas and has been known to say y'all so please welcome Chelsea to the show hello hi Sarah thanks for having me yeah thanks so much for coming on uh we're going to talk about your journey to publication today we're going to start all the way back at the beginning when did you first start
getting interested in writing and then how long did it take from there before you started getting serious about pursuing publication I says I've always been a writer I've always been a writer um but before I was a fiction writer I was a journalist by trade so I worked at alternative news weeklies magazines and newspapers for a period as my my real job and when I left newspapers to go into marketing as a day job because newspapers were a volatile place to be and I really missed writing every day
I didn't realize how much joy and like just like the creativity that comes with that was like great for my mental health and how much I missed it so I had started a Blog because also can't take a Critic out of me so I you know I went from writing about music to writing about books on a Blog and then just for myself started writing a novel or what what would be a novel it was really short and because of the blog which was vampire book club it's still up it's there's not new posts because I'm real
real busy but but I did Vampire book club for a long long time and got to know a lot of authors as a result of doing blog tours and reviews and interviews there with published authors to the point where finally somebody was like well I want to see what you're writing okay and then I started getting the nudge of like well why aren't you querying this like this this is good you should try and get it published and I really hadn't considered it I really was doing it because I I had to like I needed
needed to write awesome so how did you learn more about the publishing industry like how it works how to query all that different stuff I think I was fortunate that my journalism background requires me to be a research nerd and so I also had the connections to ask people who knew what was going on so I knew that I needed a query just from talking to authors and then I was the queen of Google I definitely sought out every different article I still go back Susan Dennard had a post on pub crawl th
at's how to write a one-page synopsis and don't tell don't tell my editors but every single time I have to write one I have a bookmarked I go back and reread it she like does the the one page synopsis as if she was doing it for Star Wars but sometimes I need the reminder of like how to do this that's kind of how I started doing that I started searching found query tracker which was a godsend to me who is also a data nerd and it lets you track everything that lets you research everybody you still
have to verify it elsewhere at the time I was searching for agents the first time I am on my second agent there were less places to look like manuscript wishlist wasn't wasn't an option Twitter was not what it is now it was a different place it was a different time I just I Googled a lot I took every free resource I could I went to all these different agents agency websites and read about each of these agents I was definitely the person in Barnes and Noble who flipped to the backs of all the bo
oks that I liked to see who they thinked in acknowledgments um and look for consistencies there now you can find more of that online thankfully but nobody at b m care that I was sitting down between the stacks looking at acknowledgments pages so then what happened can you break down your journey from then to signing your first book contract the book that I shared with a couple author friends way back when I queried it I followed all of the rules I'm marketed by trade so I got 20 full requests tw
o revising submits and zero offers now many years later I can say yeah I get it while I was waiting and I was so like holy everybody has asked for this book it's gonna be amazing and they read opening pages and stuff I worked on the next thing and the next thing was a book called Cloud9 it's really so fun why near future sci-fi it's romance and fighting and all the stuff I love and I just focused on that and I got to this point like I'm not even hearing back on these fools it's been a really lon
g time so well I'm gonna query with the new book it's been over a year it's okay it's okay like this book is definitively way better so I I went out again and three weeks later had several offers for representation there was there was no sitting on the fence anymore I got the call which was fun I got to talk to different agents also fun I had to make a decision less fun um I signed with my first agent and we took Cloud9 out we did we did a round of edits internally and then she she shopped Cloud
9 and it went to editorial at five different houses I was so excited and marketing said we don't know what to do with this book right now so I did not get any offers on cloud nine hmm super super fun but I learned from from before that uh well one uh I have to always be writing or I'm not as happy of a person so I was going to be writing anyway and two man eyes on your own paper is the way to live your life as an author and you're never going to feel great looking at what's happening with everyo
ne else because those things are good things that should happen for other people and your stuff will happen when it happens and you can only control what you're writing right now naturally while we were waiting I was writing something else and I was writing something entirely different I also just really love urban fantasy and so I wrote a gritty sexy urban fantasy for for adults and I started working on it and I was like I I don't even know my agent at the time specialized in y a I sent sent he
r like that first I don't know maybe 50 pages and her reply was in all caps like yes do this please send this to me I blasted through revisions on it we took it out it sold in six weeks like within a month of the contract like we were doing covers like that was the first thing we did was cover art and all of a sudden it went from like so long of nose to like and here's a visual representation of your main character in your world and we're all really excited and then I had to wait like nine month
s for edits or something dumb it took forever yeah it's time for the first cue of the podcast can you read your successful query letter for us the query of letter I'm going to use is actually a more recent one the sold Tremor books with moved from the agency and stepped away from doing the the direct stuff and focusing on foreign rates instead and so we decided to find someone new and that's where I'm at now so this is a query letter that I use for my agent Naomi Davis who I adore so I will I wi
ll read this bravely so I say hello and then casual conversations About Love and Murder is a 78 000 word young adult novel that pairs the complicated female friendships of soccer girls with the Never Say Die Spirit of Veronica Mars what would you do if your best friend died what if she'd betrayed you hours earlier Emma's nights are haunted by the twisted side of her friend's body in Stone Lake others in the Sleepy town of camber slap an accident label on her death and call it a day Emma can't it
hurts too much to leave it alone proving the drowning was murder isn't easy the sheriff's stonewalls or her friends want her to leave it alone and her parents are too busy bickering to worry over much else Cole's mistrust for corporations and the government hasn't made him many friends in town but his willingness to believe Emma makes him her strongest Ally together they'll dig into the town's past and their own to get to the truth the accidents don't stop with one friend death creeps ever clos
er to Emma's door can she find the murderer before another person she loves dies when the killer sets their sights on her will Emma be able to make a choice that determines who lives and who dies my adult urban fantasy Soul charmer series is in development at Netflix my previous agent has retired and I'm seeking a career-focused partnership I'm a marketing executive at my day job and I speak frequently at rwa Chapters on leveraging digital marketing as an author in other words I am game to do so
me heavy lifting to boost the reach of publisher marketing efforts I'm also up for being a debut again on the y a front with a pen name a synopsis and the first 10 pages of casual conversations About Love and Murder are included per year submission guidelines please let me know if you'd like to read more I'd love to send you the completed manuscript sincerely Chelsea Mueller awesome thanks for sharing I will just add real quick that vertebrae gets their hopes up while we went real real far down
the Netflix train it's all on hold so sorry that's how that's how film options work yeah thank you thank you for making sure we're not searching on Netflix right now so how has your experience been since signing that first contract especially let us know what things really surprised you along the way I think the biggest surprise since signing a first contract I think it's actually true across the board throughout your career is it the goal posts continue to move like I think there's this expecta
tion that you get an agent and then you're in or you get that for still and you're in and there's always another bar that you're going to move to like so I I had I've had more than one option happen um where we sold film or TV rights or we did an option or we made it really far where we even hired writers and per like there was a producer and everything was attached and then it doesn't happen so that's like my that's like my new like oh that's the thing I want you know there's always a another s
tep there and I think we as writers have a real heart adjustment from going from it's all about the creative output of this is the story of this is the book of my heart this is the thing I'm creating to this is a business and it will be treated as a commodity which is a good thing and a healthy thing like understanding that I was really fortunate with barred Souls that the cover is just Bonkers good it's for me exactly it's what it is on the you'll get the vibe but what if it hadn't been you kno
w I get consultation on covers but understanding that all of those things are done to market the book and make sure it gets the best reach the best placement in stores I feel like there's a steep learning curve to adjusting your mindset too okay we spent this time on the meat of the book and working really hard and now we are gonna treat it as it's it's an object and it's not this this thing we spend all the time on the inside and now okay here's the three words that we're going to use to pitch
it and this is what you'll say when you go to an event learning how you hold back the writer Joy um and maintain that is important I think finding finding other people who are going through it at the same time like your little writer group of friends or Community can be really helpful to remind you like yeah no like all of us are like wait this is part of the process can be really helpful during that first year it is time for author DNA it's a quick round just kind of classification so we like t
o put writers in are you a panther or a plotter can it be both a lot of people say that I'm a tempest person so I know my key turning points but not how we're getting there do you tend to be an overwriter or an underwriter overwriter fits fantasy underwriter if it's a thriller do you prefer to write in the morning or at night in the morning it's new it's a mom thing when starting a new project you typically start with character or plot or concept or something else first character always do you p
refer coffee or tea coffee when writing do you prefer silence or some kind of sound silence when it comes to the first draft are you more of a get it down kind of person or get it right kind of person get it down what tools or software do you use to draft usually scrivener do you prefer drafting or revising more revising do you write in sequential order do you hop around depends on the book and final quick round question are you an extrovert or an introvert introvert but a fake extrovert real re
al good now we're going to talk about the second cue of the podcast what were some of the qualms or worries that you had on your journey and do you feel like they were realized or you overcame them or how did they shake out when it comes to worries me one of my markers of success or a thing that matters to me is like I want I want people to like my book but like I I like critical acclaim so knowing that I did something that resonates matters so I was really worried about getting like book lists
to review it I was really worried about whether or not like would it end up in Publishers Weekly like would I like Library during all of those mattered so much to me which at the time I did not know that like every book gets sent to them like they may not review it and they may not like it but they all get sent it's a pretty standard round so for me that was a that was a win what I didn't know then that I know now doesn't really change I still like it is that it doesn't really sell you like more
books I mean certainly there's a visibility component and the library piece can be really good it's been really nice for ya I really can't thank Librarians enough for all the love that they give prom house Librarians are listening you can message me and I will make sure you have prom house like I I will help you out so that was a surprise too I think is is understanding where things are going to land I also think that there there are scenes where I think I really push where I try to push things
a little bit far and then it's never the scene that people are like what is wrong with you although I will say I think everybody that I've talked to has the same favorite murder in prom house which makes me feel real good it was also my favorite murder so I feel real good about that and now it's time for the third queue do you have any writing quirks is there anything about your process that you think is kind of different or interesting or unique I definitely do things in different orders depen
ding on what kind of book I'm writing I have been working on I had been working on edging toward Epic Fantasy and that was a very different process it was multi-pov it was really long versus a horror Thriller kind of like prom house because I know you're a true pantser so you might understand this I always know who the Killer is but I don't always know why they killed them until I start writing um and so I want to write an order when we're doing that I leverage the icon feature in scrivener to d
o a couple things depending on the book sometimes I use it to track POV which is like a normal thing to do but I also like to use it to track pacing and enjoy making sure that there's an icon of a little skull every time there's a chapter where somebody dies there's a running joke in my writer group that when this fantasy comes out I will have to do a chart a bar chart to show the body count increase in my novels over time because even if they're not a horror or they're not a thriller somehow th
ere's just there's dead bodies yeah yeah I would say I can't help it but that's not true I'm just by making a choice so yeah I like to use use icons in scrivener not just for that but so I can see particularly when you're looking at something like thriller or horror pacing where it's got that really Snappy movement that I'm being mindful of the Cadence of those jaw-droppy scenes in the Cadence of twists so that you have breathing room so you have a moment to come up yeah so I like to use icons f
or this so I always put in like little emojis like custom emojis for everything I didn't know you could use emojis and scriven her I will send you a tutorial okay if you want I love it when you're in the lowest parts of your journey whatever that may have been for you what kept you going and why did you stick to it one I'm really competitive I'm just gonna admit that so it's really hard for me to just give up on stuff I know that I can write I know that I can write a good book I know that at thi
s point at this point in my career too I also know that timing is a big piece the more I talk with others the more you listen to what others have to say about their Journeys which hey you're all you're listening to this podcast Smart View the more it's clear that persistence and like perseverance in publishing is vital it's the K that book didn't work I'm gonna keep doing something else and keep leveling up because I think that's the piece is the the knowing that if I keep writing I've had more
practice every book that I write is better than the last book that I wrote I've learned something new I admittedly try to try new things in each book so that I make myself try harder I like even this this last book that I was working on that fantasy I remember sitting down with with my agent and was like well I don't know if I should do this I you know I've been writing why a I've been writing these really short Snappy books and this is like meaty and it's an onion layer book as in I put like Mi
chael Bay layer on the top of like explosions and cool stuff because I like that but then underneath it's like here are all of these these very big themes and important things I want to say and also like can I put interstitials in this and what if there's no romance I like everybody knows me for writing romance can I do that the way that that they looked at me and were like you have the talent to do this you just have to want to sit down and do it like You're great and push yourself you don't ne
ed permission go right the thing you want to write do the thing you love so I think that's part of coming back out of of whatever lows there are and there always are there's always you know a point when it's not not fun my determination to just keep doing things is probably part of it also as previously discussed I have learned that Chelsea does it right I'm pretty grumpy and no one must be around me and I do like some people do you feel like you made any mistakes along the way that you might li
ke to share so maybe listeners don't make the same ones I certainly think that everyone signing new traditional contracts should be really mindful of their reversion Clauses and understand the language around them which is a long game thing but there's a lot of opportunity and Nuance there where if you've moved on or like in the case of like my soul charmer books like the publisher really isn't doing urban fantasy anymore it's been a minute where eventually like I would like to be able to to mak
e those available in new regions or elsewhere if I'd been more aggressive around that clause and understanding how it works early on would have been helpful and particularly because I wasn't with that agent anymore but the agency was still running it so I didn't have somebody who's like actively like staying on top of it being like Oh here when your your dates are for when you can ask for this or ask ask for that if they don't sell it so in my case they like they sold my audio rights after I cou
ld have gotten them back and sold them myself or done it myself I'm glad that there's an audio that there's audiobooks yay it took them a while to get there but we missed the window to be able to claim them and own that a bit more all right you've done this a little bit but can you share with listeners one of the most important lessons that you learned on your journey to publication yep I definitely underscore the perseverance it's a standard thing to hear somebody some author that's published s
ay just write that next thing and it sounds like such a hand wavy like we just have so many stories in us which you probably do we all know that the problem is never that you need a book idea when you're at a party and somebody says oh well I wish I could write a book I just I have so many ideas that's not the problem but it's actually genuine advice the focus on writing the next thing because every writing career is not one book it's many books so let's say the book that you are trying to get a
agent with you get the agent right away it sells right away you're still going to have down time before you're gonna be editing but also when you get to that point that editor is going to go so what else do you have you might even get on the call with the editor because maybe you maybe you went to auction you've got multiple offers you get to talk to everybody you get to do it again it's very fun and here are their vision for your book and all that but they may also go so like what else do you
have you want to be able to have an answer but also as soon as that contracts up you don't want to just have the one contract or maybe I don't anyway for every writer in the history of ever it's worthwhile to be working on the next thing for many reasons for the long game and for helping build the eyes on our own paper which I think can be a way to minimize the overall impact of imposter syndrome can help minimize the jealousy that that is natural and inherent in this business yeah and the compa
rison game yeah for real all right I call this the acknowledgments portion of the podcast this is not a business that most of us succeed in completely on our own so who are some of the people who helped you along the way and how there are so many I want to start with Dorinda Jones Dorinda is the like if you find bird Souls she's the front cover blurb she was so supportive of my debut and is just a kind human being um so helpful for me gave me good advice nalini Singh gave me such good advice so
supportive there were a lot of authors when I debuted that definitely brought the elevator back down that I really really appreciated Kevin Hearn was incredibly helpful when when I got my first agent he was he was very key in that there's so many I mean boss was was wonderful and helpful and kind there were a lot of people who gave good advice and have just been generous with their time and energy when such a long list and I think it it shifts over time to I've been to where like there were defi
nitely people who helped me figure things out early on and then it's it's been interesting now that I and I'm still I mean I have six books that it's not like I you know have a huge catalog but being able to have new writer friends who are going to debut and being able to be like what do you need how can I help you that's one of the things that I think is can be really beautiful in this industry because one it can feel very solitary so having people extend a hand is nice but also like despite ou
r I guess instinctive need to do the comparison game like a rising tag lifts all boats so it's good to have friends writing the same genre it's good to have you know that you guys can share and and tell readers about each other and so it's it's beneficial across the board all right before you go can you tell us about your latest release I can't actually this this is a nice little end cap so get ready y'all I just released Cloud9 yeah the book that I got my first agent on and it went to editorial
at five houses it's one of those books that critique Partners even from back in like 2014 who read it like way back when would message me periodically be like man I just can't stop thinking about Cloud9 Cloud9 has had two offers that I turned down from small presses and so finally I I'm releasing it I released it myself on March 7th it is super Breakneck fast-paced snarky enemies to leverage underscored romance but it's not super heavy on the romance like in a not a lot of on-page action but li
ke also kissing in the middle of fight so it's the first in a Trilogy super fun and then I'm also still absolutely happy and tickled anybody picks up prom house so prom house is like a throwback to RL Stein Fear Street kind of stuff 10 kids around a prom house for you know a weekend they get locked in one by one they start to die whose prom date could be a killer and the reason I bring it up one is because it's fun and you can go buy it but two right now there's a special edition of it in Five B
elow it has a more red cover it's very very bloody cover um depending on if you're looking for a steal I'll I'll mention it via a Five Below near you there are you us retail chain and you can go get it for five bucks along with a couple other really good reads Chelsea thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your story with everyone thank you for having me I hope it's helpful thank you so much for listening to this episode of Cory's qualms and quirks you can find the text of Chelsea'
s query in the show notes along with links to find out more about her and her books if you enjoyed the show I'd really appreciate if you'd help me find new listeners by leaving a review on Apple podcast or podchaser telling your friends or sharing the episode on social media if you're interested in supporting the show go to patreon.com Sarah Nicholas that's Sarah with an H and Nicholas with no h and if you're a publish author interested in being a guest on the show please click on the home base
Link in the description or go to sarahnicholas.com and click on the podcast logo in the sidebar that is again Sarah with nature and Nicholas with no h thank you so much for listening and we'll see you next time foreign
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