PAGE MASTER

For a well-informed author, there are few things that are as stressful—or that strike as much fear into the heart—as the quality of their first 10 pages.

Initially, you might think querying is the scariest stage of the publishing process. But with a query, there’s a tried-and-true formula. You can go to entire day-long seminars on how to pitch your idea online or in-person. There are endless opportunities to get critiques and feedback in as little as 10 minutes. And while there are 101 reasons an agent might pass on a query, none of them have to do with how good of a novelist you are. Consider that your query readers haven’t even seen your book at this point, so all they have to work with are five paragraphs and an idea. Now tell me that that doesn’t take the pressure off!

The context changes, however, when you get to the partial stage of querying. By the time an agent starts reading your actual pages, they’ve already decided they like—or love—your idea, and so they turn their eye toward execution. And it might alarm you to hear this, but 99 percent of the time an agent stops reading a partial before Page 10.

MEA CULPA

Let’s pause for a moment and address how frustrating it is for writers that most industry professionals only