Tracy C. Gold

I had so much fun chatting with Maria Frazer on her “What’s for Launch” podcast all about what it was like to publish “Everyone’s Sleepy but the Baby.” Take a listen if you’re curious about what it takes to publish a board book, the poetry inside picture books, and what it was like to launch a book in the middle of a pandemic.

Also, I’m super excited for Maria’s forthcoming middle grade book, “Margarita in the Spotlight,” which is an Audible Original coming out this Fall! I love audiobooks, and this one is about a family of musicians, so it sounds perfect for the format!

I am so excited that the cover for my book, “Trick or Treat, Bugs to Eat” is finally live! Illustrator Nancy Leschnikoff and the team at Sourcebooks Kids did such beautiful work on this book!

Here is a little video with the cover at the end that my agent, Carrie Pestritto, helped me put together!

To read about how I got the idea for this book, and enter to win a virtual call from amazing author Tara Lazar, head over to her blog, where the cover for this Halloween book was first revealed on April 8!

I am doing a preorder campaign for this book–if you preorder it, I will send you free stickers! I have details about that here. It comes out from Sourcebooks on August 1, 2021, with plenty of time before Halloween.

Hi, Pitch Wars mentee hopefuls! You are probably reading this after you have submitted your Pitch Wars applications, while you’re waiting to hear from potential mentors. Or perhaps you’re spotting this before the official blog hop, or this post has come up a year or two down the road at another stage of the process. Either way, I’m here to share my advice as a two-time Pitch Wars mentee. I also applied a third time because I loved it so much and didn’t get in that third time (okay, alright, it was greedy to apply again!).  

Here are a few thoughts that should be helpful for you at this stage of the game. 

Querying is unlike anything I’ve experienced in any other industry: it’s guided by unspoken rules. Everyone has slightly different ideas of what those rules are, and newbies can be left completely oblivious.

I’ll cover some basic guidelines for tricky situations that come up when you’re querying. These guidelines come from talking to other querying writers, and partly from seeing querying from the other side, via my internship with agent Carrie Pestritto (though she hasn’t seen this post, so these are my views, not hers!).

A few months ago, I decided to close down the editing company I cofounded, Sounding Sea Writers’ Workshop, as my cofounders had moved on in life, and managing a company presented extra complexity compared to being a sole practitioner. I’m now reposting the content I had created for Sounding Sea on my personal website.

Thanks to some recent pitch contests, I’ve been talking to a lot of new writers who are thinking about approaching literary agents. Below, I’ll break down the basic process of seeking literary agents and explain some of the common vocabulary that trips newcomers up. Note that this post is primarily geared towards writers of fiction and memoir, with a few notes for non-fiction writers to keep in mind.

Update: this webinar, and a transcript, for those who prefer reading, is posted here.

If Game of Thrones inspired you to write your own epic fantasy, join me for a free webinar about how to manage multiple points of view. I’m recording live and doing an exclusive Q & A next Wednesday at 3 pm New York time. The main webinar & transcript will be posted afterward.

I’m a huge fan of the show, but for this webinar, I’ll mainly be talking about the first book. Read, or reread at your own risk (I’m now halfway through the audiobook of A Clash of Kings, 40-some hours later). You don’t have to read the book to understand the webinar, but the webinar will certainly spoil the first book, and potentially the whole series. Spoiler alert! You’ve been warned.

I’ll cover the following concepts:

1. How to choose which character narrates a scene

2. How to decide whether a character deserves to have a POV section at all

3. How to avoid confusing your readers 

4. How to choose between first person and third person

5. How to make each voice distinct

Thanks to Reedsy for hosting me!

Register for free here.

I adore writing and reading in the first person. Escaping into a character’s mind in first person carries me away into fictional worlds. I help a lot of my editing clients navigate writing first person, or decide whether to write in first or third person. Reedsy, a database of freelance editors, designers, and other publishing experts, published some of my thoughts on the matter, along with other great advice on writing in first person.

Read the whole post about writing in the first person here.