Wednesday! 3.30.11

Mixed bag of linkage today, friends:

Big Bad (and not so bad) Agents
I'm going to my first three day conference in a month so I'm trying to gather advice for conference season - here's a piece on the Philly Liar's Club site on how to pitch an agent at a conference.

And from agent Vickie Motter more tips on 'speed dating' an agent.

Continuing on the agent theme, GalleyCat has a listing of the best agents on twitter.

Contests!
Carolina Valdez-Miller has a cool contest to go along with the cool news that she got herself an agent - YEE-HA!

I know I mentioned this yesterday, but it's such a cool idea, looking at the first 101 words of your WIP closely. Hop over to Lesser Apricots and submit your first 101 for the chance to win a one page critique and lots of other goodies.

And under the topic of Authors Doing (sometimes strange) Things When Not Writing:

Laura Miller over at Salon ponders what would have become of reclusive authors of yore if they'd been compelled to do the kind of 'author platform building' and self-selling that is expected these days. As it is it's a miracle Edgar Allen Poe got published, but if he'd had to show up, sober and social, to a book signing? Nevermore.

As Nick the Stripper says, Flame ON! A tweet from Neil Gaiman shared a link to BigAl's Books and Pals and entreated all to NOT DO THIS. 'This' turned out to be a flaming war between reviewer, commenters and an author of several e-books. Salon rounds up and 'splains the shenanigans.

John Le Carre has turned down being nominated for the Man Booker International prize. Why? He doesn't compete for literary awards. Does he, perhaps, compete while playing darts or while Morris Dancing? Is this a fickle muse thing? What do you think about authors who take themselves out of the running for awards?

Lastly, but not leastly, there's an experiment on twitter. I call it an experiment because I can't figure out how it would work, but more power to them. It's a murder mystery on the Twitter. I will try to figure it out and follow. Starts tonight at 7pm EST and goes on for 3 hours.