Writing a Successful Query On Purpose
…seriously, it’s not easy! I wish I could just straight-out ask what I’d done right on what is either the third or fourth draft of my query letter, and third attempt sending things out (to be fair, the second was a complete “AAARGH WANT PUBLISH” try, Neandertal in personality and simian in well-thought-outedness).
For all I know, though, it was the timing that did it. Beginning of year, guys–from what else I’ve seen, through April or May (starting right in January, I guess) is when to do it. Or maybe it was adding another 7,000 words, so I queried with 70,111 instead of 63,000…. And this time, I knew it was short for a book, so I actually addressed that issue (AgentQuery had this nice bit of advice mentioning that literary works can get away with shortness…they also said not to use their name, oops…).
I was originally planning to do a number of helpful little advice-y posts here, but quite frankly all I did was read up on what these things are supposed to look like, and there’s a ton of good advice on it–even, or perhaps especially, Query Shark (right? Oh man I haven’t been on Twitter in ages. Simply because getting a constant flood of new tweets drives me nuts). Anyway, the point is there are a ton of good resources. If you can’t Google well enough to find a good resource (or do the obvious and hit up AgentQuery.com), you should learn—twenty-first century, yo. Actually, I assume you’d know how to find resources if you’re here….
Writing a synopsis: now there’s something I might do a real guide to, because the ones I found weren’t much help at all.
