Lisa Abellera joined Kimberley Cameron and Associates in 2013 with a background in management, marketing, and finance. She earned her BA in Strategic Management from Dominican University and MFA in Writing from University of San Francisco. She enjoys stories with high personal stakes, characters with deep inner lives, lush world-building, and fiction that explores the human condition, especially within family and close relationships.

She is seeking upmarket, literary, and women's fiction, historical fiction, mystery, suspense, thrillers, science fiction, most fantasy except paranormal (no vampires, zombies, werewolves, etc.), romance if an element or sub-genre, and all YA and middle grade fiction genres. She is especially looking for stories by #ownvoices authors and writers from marginalized or underrepresented backgrounds. 

Lisa will be offering 15-minute consults, a critique roundtable, and participating in our agent/editor panel luncheon. She will also be teaching the following sessions: 

Introduction to Publishing: A Primer on Publishing and Querying Agents - Have you completed your book and are now ready to query? Or have you been querying but have not been successful in getting an agent to request your pages? In my workshop, I introduce the four publishing paths and discuss their differences, but I focus mainly on the traditional path and what it means to partner with a literary agent. I explain what a literary agent is and does, along with advice on finding and querying agents. I explain the elements of a query letter and how to craft an effective one, taking the class through steps on writing a persuasive and memorable query pitch. 

Getting More Out of Social Media: New Ways to Query and Pitch Your Book - The pressure to constantly network and promote oneself on social media can be overwhelming. At the same time, authors must come up with compelling queries and tantalizing pitches for their books. With thousands of others in the same boat, how can you stand out? And how can an agent, looking for your type of project, find you? In this session, Lisa Abellera will introduce authors to additional ways to pitch and query their books using social media, providing in-depth information about online query contests and Twitter pitch parties, including the essentials to a successful 280-character pitch.