Query Letters

Hi everyone,

Today is Sunday and since I don’t get much writing done on Sundays, I thought I’d concentrate on writing queries instead. I submitted three. It takes time to research each agent but I did that over the last couple of weeks. That made it much faster.

Anyway, not much else to report. So I’ll just ramble on about query letters for a minute.

• Query letters take time to write and edit so I suggest you start them BEFORE you finish your manuscript. You’ll need to draft and redraft. That’s okay. It doesn’t mean you are bad at it. It’s not something that’s easy.

• Keep them short-don’t go over a page.

• You don’t need to summarise your entire story in the query. You just want the agent hooked. Include your inciting incident, the next plot point and the midpoint, then leave them on a question or a dilemma that the main character has. The query letter is just to give the agent a taste of your book. Is it something they’d like to read? It’s not a synopsis.

• Only send to agents that represent your genre.

• Find out what is the accepted bandwidth of the word count for your genre and try to be inside it.

• Read a lot of sample queries because there is a form to it.

• Don’t send out your first draft of your query letter.

• Research agents and try to read books they’ve represented.

• Make sure to include the story and conflict of your book in the query letter. Don’t get lost discussing your novel’s themes.

That’s all for now.

I’ll talk to you again tomorrow.

Happy writing,

Joanne.