An interesting side-effect of winning an Honorable Mention in the Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards was that I got an e-mail from a literary agency. More properly, an intern at the agency. Still, a literary agency contacted me. Pretty nice and something I was very secretly wishing for. It was a heady moment.
Since she contacted me about two weeks before the Spitzer scandal broke, I knew it was genuine interest. Anything else I would’ve dismissed. And it was an agency I had considering querying (eons ago when I was querying agencies). So that was very good.