Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

Congrats @ELA! As someone who for the past two years is familiarized with the publishing industry, it’s very difficult to land a Literary Agent. When it comes to Fiction, only about 1 in 200 novels solicited to agents are picked up for representation. There are a few ways for the writer to raise their odds. In the case of your wife’s YA series she’s already hitting two bench marks for what an agent is looking for. For the sake of marketability and sales potential, agents seek out fiction with clearly defined audiences. And YA/fantasy is currently riding a high. Agents also seek out multi-book authors (especially authors building series) in order to capitalize on potentially growing readerships – one sale turning into four.

For any writers discouraged by the difficulty of breaking into traditional publishing, remember two things: 1) Books are another wing of the entertainment industry where it takes not only talent but plenty of luck in terms of timing and striking unperceivable cords to break in. And more importantly, 2) the last 10 – 15 years has seen enormous growth to what is a very effective self-publishing industry, complete with services like editing, marketing, cover/interior design, and paperback/ebook distribution. Amazon KDP and SparkPress are the two most robust self-publishing platforms.

She said the agent brought up the possibilities of a multi-book series as why she was interested.  I actually don't think it's her best book, but the one I did, was (a) not fantasy and (b) a one off

Maybe down the road, if she gets this published, they will be more receptive to that one.

My self-published novel went live on Amazon to start the New Year.

To kick off the research phase for a hopeful next novel, I’ve got at least a month of evening reading ahead of me. See what you can make of the following titles I’m consuming to develop key story elements and the two main characters:

-Benzodiazepines: How They Work & How To Withdraw
-Ukraine Adoption: How we did it – How you can too
-Flight Attendant Survival Guide
-After Silence: Rape & My Journey Back
-US Navy’s Command Investigation into the Facts and Circumstances Surrounding the Fire Onboard USS Bonhomme Richard July 2020
-my own journaling from volunteer work with the homeless and foster kids

My step son gave me "Hail Mary" for Christmas, but just like TKAMB has nothing about killing birds, this is not about football.  It's interesting, I think it has some technnical errors in it at times but is creative and decently written (same author as The Martian).  I'm about half through.

I read it during the fall, and really liked it. 

When I read The Martian, I felt like it was a really enjoyable read, but there were a few flaws in its construction. Key amongst them was that I never, during the entire book, actually was concerned that the protagonist wouldn't survive and make it back home. It wasn't a "Game of Thrones" scenario, where you feel like any character, including the ones you like the most, might die at any time. It led to a book that IMHO didn't have all that much suspense to it. The protagonist is on a world that can literally kill him in any uncountable number of ways, and I never seriously considered it would happen. 

A central plot point of Hail Mary, as you well know (and it becomes clear almost immediately in the book so I don't mind the spoiler) is that it's a suicide mission. So that immediately removes a big issue that I had with The Martian. And other aspects of the book, which you haven't yet gotten to, bring in non-technical plot twists. Whereas The Martian was the protagonist mostly trying to solve technical problems, this brings in a compelling aspect of the story that didn't exist there.

So while I still have some issues with the construction for other reasons, I found The Martian enjoyable enough and Hail Mary even more so. 

We have a small library in the building and I've sampled quite a few of them of late, most I read two chapters and return.  I did read 3 of Child's books in the Reacher series,  they are reasonably well written and OK.  I'm a bit surprised how many get published that simply are poorly written and uninteresting.  Some may be vanity publishing.

I'm working on a new one myself, a fantasy world novel.  I'm at 25,000 words and trying to inject some tense moments and conflict, I find that difficult.  Twists and turns are also hard to manage, for me.

I put the civil war series I wrote in the library, probably won't get any reaction.  Authoring is hard.

FNL is a fantastic book.  It absolutely captured the desperation, and hope, found in an oil-busted Texas town in the late 80s.

I was in high school at the time, exact same age as many of the key players in that book.  Even though Austin isn't as small-town as Odessa, it had a much smaller-town feel than huge cities like Dallas and Houston at the time, and I could definitely relate.

I liked the TV series okay, but it wasn't much like the book.  The movie with Billy Bob Thornton, on the other hand, was.

A thing I'll suggest for those here who can type pretty well (which should be most) is to write your biography(auto) and get it printed by Amazon/Kindle.

FNL is a fantastic book.  It absolutely captured the desperation, and hope, found in an oil-busted Texas town in the late 80s.

I was in high school at the time, exact same age as many of the key players in that book.  Even though Austin isn't as small-town as Odessa, it had a much smaller-town feel than huge cities like Dallas and Houston at the time, and I could definitely relate.

I liked the TV series okay, but it wasn't much like the book.  The movie with Billy Bob Thornton, on the other hand, was.

The show, along with the 1999 FNL-inspired Varsity Blues was shot in and around Austin, specifically Coupland and Elgin for Varsity Blues.

I was a kid living in Texas when Varsity Blues released. I took it for granted then, but when watching Varsity Blues two decades later, I’m always impressed by how many details are accurate to my 90s experience of Texas High School Football:

-Parents waiting an additional year to enroll their boys in kindergarten so their builds were more matured and filled out for football once high school rolled around
-Friday Football pep rallies held in the gyms for the entire school to attend instead of classes.
-Long lines of school busses and vehicle traffic caravanning together to other towns for road games
-Extensive local newspaper coverage of the high school football season topped by front page stories of standout players or high profile matchups, not only in smaller town papers but front page coverage for markets as large at Tyler (100k?) and Corpus Christi (300k?)
-Signs of the players posted in their yards. On my street several of our neighbors were home to varsity players. To kick off the season the cheerleading squad stopped by in their uniforms to post signs of specifically numbered jerseys in their front yards.
-Season football highlights sold in VHS tapes at the local video rental store – I don’t remember this detail being the case; however, for Friday game nights, the local news added an additional half hour at the end of their 10 o’clock news to parade highlights and live updates from area wide football games.