Monday, December 12, 2011

Swag Winners-Writer Appreciation Giveaway!

Guys. GUYS. We have two winners for the season of swag Writer Appreciation giveaway:

Cherie aka @writercheri on Twitter

aaaaaaaaand

C D Meetens


Congratulations! May your day be filled with confetti, cupcakes, and chicken wings (see how easy it is to include the magic rule of three in writing?). Winners, please email your mailing address to byannabanks (at) gmail (dot) com, and I'll get your gift certificates to you. Thanks all for participating, and stayed tuned for more giveaways. Plus, you don't want to miss all my rants and peeks into the publishing world from the eyes of a debut author. :)

Friday, December 2, 2011

Season of Swag-Writer Appreciation

I'm baaaack! After a two month hiatus, I'm ready to throw around some more swag, and the theme this month is WRITER APPRECIATION!

We all know that the writing community is one of the most supportive, encouraging communities out there. And we all know why: Breaking into the publishing industry is freaking hard! Writing queries is suckish! Rejection hurts like a beeeoch!

So, in partnership with The Editorial Department, I'm giving away not one, but TWO (because I was gone for two months) gift certificates for the following:

"Redeemable for a critique and editorial analysis of a one-page query letter and sample material for agent or publisher submission of up to 2,500 words. Book length adult and young adult fiction and nonfiction only please."

So that's a professional critique of a query letter and roughly your first ten pages! And I have to tell you, I'm excited to be giving this away. I wish I'd known about these folks when I was being pitched about in the query hurricane. The co-owner, Renni Browne, is also the co-author of SELF EDITING FOR FICTION WRITERS, a book I highly recommended to writers, even before I stumbled across the website for The Editorial Department.

So, if you'd like to enter to win, here are the rules:

1.) You must be un-agented.
2.) You must follow my blog.
3.) You must follow me on Twitter, and tweet about this contest at least once. (please include a link to this post, and my handle @byannabanks in your tweet. If you do not, I may miss your tweet!)
4.) The contest will end Saturday, December 17th at midnight. The winners will be chosen using Random.org, and will be posted on my blog on Monday, December 19th.
5.) There will be two winners, one for each gift certificate.


And that's it! Okay....GO!

Hiatus

I am going to make this brief. My mom unexpectedly passed away on October 27th. One week she was diagnosed with cancer, the next week we were told she had 7-10 days left. She passed away within 36 hours after that. While I don't wish to give details, I will say that naturally, I didn't feel like doing much blogging, writing, or anything in general during these past two months, hence my absence.

Thanks for everyone's well wishes, thoughts, and prayers.

Anna