Field Trip Response

The trip to Barnes & Noble was such an overwhelmingly positive experience that two-hundred words could scarcely capture my feelings. Particularly enlightening was speaker Jonathon Maberry, who detailed his life as a published author. He spoke of the relationship between author and agent, author and editor, and, the combative union of art and commercialism. I thought it was interesting that Maberry made artistic concessions to maintain a fruitful relationship with his editor. And although Maberry claimed to have vented frustrations to his agent, he showed no ill will toward the editor. Clearly this man’s business instincts are as sharp as his literary chops.
Maberry kindly made himself available to individual students after lecturing the class as a whole. He proved to be a wealth of information, and I learned much during our brief discussion. It was suggested I write query letters to agents before exploring the option of self-publishing. In fact, Maberry offered to email me a sample query letter—the same query letter that netted two of his pupils’ book deals. He recommended I visit the publishersmarketplace.com and examine purchasing trends of publishers, so as to pinpoint agents partial to my writing genre.