Query Letters (Part 2)

So last week I wrote about how I go about finding agents, but mostly about how I keep records on how I keep track of which manuscript I sent to which agent. Once that is done, I put together my query letters. Drum roll.
There is a basic query frame that I put together. There are certain things in all query letters that are required no matter who you send it to, such as your name, address, and/or email, the agency’s name and info, a salutation,  a catchy beginning, you get the idea. (Again, I’m not saying this is the best way to do things, or that this query letter writing technique will be workable for you at the time you read this, the business is constantly changing, and so are the query letter rules of form. I am just sharing the way that I do it now.) So what I create will look something like this:

Samantha Blackwell

Ifyouwantmyrealemailyoumayask.com

Date:
Agent:
Agency:
Email:

Dear (agent name),
 A plot to murder the queen has just been uncovered and her lead sorceress is dying in a cabin belonging to White, a little dwarf. Leaving it up to him and his seven cousins to find away to save the kingdom without alerting the Ordinaries to their predicament. But what do they, humble dwarfs, know about magic? Nothing! and that’s the problem. My book Understandable is full of plot twists and lovable characters that keep the pages turning. All 45,000 words are tightly packed with information, keeping the adventure fast paced, sure to excite a wide age range not just the middle graders as I originally I intended. 

  The adventure is split into three parts, “How it Began”, “What Now?”, and “Is it over Yet?”; White’s journey takes you through a wonderful fairytale land that lies just beyond our front doors, filled with perils like dragons, assassins, gremlins, and the unknowing Ordinaries (us).

  I’ve never been published, but I have been a writer all of my life. I believe Understandable is more than ready to be read. (How I found your agency), and I’m sending query letters to other agents too.

(Say what I’ve pasted to the email). Please let me know if you would like to read more about my book.

  Thanks for your consideration,
 Samantha Blackwell

As you can see, I make my query letter not unlike a movie commercial, it’s exciting and hooks you right in, telling you just enough for you to get excited about the story, but not enough for you to know what actually happens in the book, which leaves you wanting more.

Once this draft is written out, I then copy and paste it to another document on my laptop, and save the original for later. With the copy, I fill in the blanks and boom, it’s ready to send to an agent or publisher of my choice, and because I saved the original with all the blanks in it, when I’m ready to send another query, all I have to do is copy it again and fill in the blanks. It’s easy and it’s fast. Every once in a while I’ll make minor changes to make the letter better, but mostly it remains the same. Here’s an example of that same query, except filled out.

Samantha Blackwell

Ifyouwantmyrealemailyoumayask.com

Date:  1/16/2010
Agent: Aurora Kingly
Agency: Fantasy Agency
Email: aurorafantasy@imadeitup.com

Dear Aurora Kingly,
 A plot to murder the queen has just been uncovered and her lead sorceress is dying in a cabin belonging to White, a little dwarf. Leaving it up to him and his seven cousins to find away to save the kingdom without alerting the Ordinaries to their predicament. But what do they, humble dwarfs, know about magic? Nothing! and that’s the problem. My book Understandable is full of plot twists and lovable characters that keep the pages turning. All 45,000 words are tightly packed with information, keeping the adventure fast paced, sure to excite a wide age range not just the middle graders as I originally I intended. 

  The adventure is split into three parts, “How it Began”, “What Now?”, and “Is it over Yet?”; White’s journey takes you through a wonderful fairytale land that lies just beyond our front doors, filled with perils like dragons, assassins, gremlins, and the unknowing Ordinaries (us).

  I’ve never been published, but I have been a writer all of my life. I believe Understandable is more than ready to be read. You’re agency was recommended to me by a fellow writer, and client of yours, Phyllis McNotReal, the author of “I’m Bored” and I thought my book would be a good fit with your agency, I’m also sending query letters to other agents too.

I have pasted the first five pages of Understandable and a synopsis to the bottom of this email. Please let me know if you would like to read more about my book.

  Thanks for your consideration,

 Samantha Blackwell

So you see, after you learn the language, and develop your own system, sending out the dreaded query letter gets to be as easy as fill in the blank.

Query Letters (Part 1)

I received a question from a fellow aspiring writer, it was about query letters. As you may know I hardly consider myself an expert on the subject, but as I began to think about it I realized that I know a whole lot more now than I did when I first began. My nature of over-studying and trying to ask more questions than I think I need to ask has taught me a lot about writing a query letter, and the delivery of that query letter.

  First off my advice to newer writers is study!! Read books on how to write query letters, on what to do and what not to do. Then find your prospect agents or publishers and then you need to study more!! I know right about now you would say that being told to study is not what you want to hear, you want me to tell you exactly what you need to do, well unfortunately every genre requires a different approach, fiction, non-fiction; what level you’re writing, child, middle school, young adult, adult and it’s sub category, college level, average intelligence, or a specific field. Which is why there are so many reference books on the subject, and the rules keep changing every year. What I tell you now may be different by the time you read this. So what am I blogging about? Well, I’m going to tell you how I get ready to write a query letter, I am not saying this is the only way to go about it, or even if this is the best way to do it, this is just what I do.

  Let me set up the situation. Let’s say that I have a story called “Understandable” (I have no such book, this is just for an example) it’s an urban fantasy (aka. a fantasy story that takes place in our world as to opposed a fantasy that take place in its own world, like Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”) The main character is…a dwarf named…White, (hey, I’m making this up as I go, so stop snickering.) White works in the mines when he returns home to see a lovely lady dressed as a traveling apple sales woman, (wait for it) she’s a powerful sorceress in disguise, and she has come to the dwarf for shelter. This is an unusual occurrence as you may expect, but White lets her in, and that night she explains that she just caught wind of a plot to kill the queen, so she was on her way to stop them, hence the disguise. White offers his help as a….guide (I guess), she says thanks but no thanks, the sorceress refuses the food White offers her, saying she can only eat the apples she has with her, for they are the key to her strength. The next morning however, White and the sorceress find the basket with the fruit has been stolen, and the sorceress will die if they are not found, and the day for the planned murder of the queen is drawing near, and they need to do all of this while keeping themselves hidden from the other people of this world: the Ordinaries (that’s us)….White goes to his seven cousins for help and together they save the sorceress.

  So what do I do first after the story is written and edited?

I go and find agents and publishers that might be interested in this kind of thing. I write out an index card for each company or agent with all their important information.

Side One:

                (1)White (2)great    other project okay                         

       

        (3) 1.16.10                 11.12.07 (4) NO

(5) Fantasy Agency

(6)Aurora Kingly

(7)Fantasy@Imadeitup.com

or Aurorafantasy@Imadeitup.com  

(8) Fantasy Agency

212 I Make It Up St.

New York, MY 99999

Explanation

(1)    I list the books I am currently searching for agent for; usually I am looking for more than one book at a time.

(2)    I make a note at how well I think my project fits the agency or publishing house in question.

(3)    I note the date that I sent the agency the query letter.

(4)    I write down “NO” when I get a refusal or no response so that I can avoid sending a query to the same place twice.

(5)    Next I list the agency name.

(6)    I list the name of the person I wish to contact; there may be more than one noted person in the company, if possible I narrow it down so that I send it directly to my desired agent or publisher.

(7)    I write down the company email and/or the specific email of the person I wish to contact.

(8)    The final thing on this page is usually the physical address of the agency or publishing house.

Side 2

(1)    Picture books, fantasy, Short Stories

(2)    Q letter Snail Mail with 1^st 5 pages & synopsis along with SASE.

(3)    Q letter with QUERY & work title in email subject with 1^st 5 pgs and synopsis of work NO attachments. WILL REPLY, if none, email again.

Explanation:

(1)    I list the preferred genres of the company, or specific person I’m going to be sending the query to, in some cases, they list only what they don’t want sent to them in which case I list those instead with NO at the beginning of the list.

(2)     I note how they wish the query letter to be sent by mail. Since I am pressed for space I use a mix of my own shorthand, and the generally accepted slang of the writing world. Q letter, meaning they want a standard query letter, which is only one page long. Snail mail, which is regular mail; a lot of agencies will not accept UPS, or other deliveries and will not even let it in through the door. Some will ask for the first few pages from your work, it can be anywhere from the first five to the first fifty pages of the work, depending on the genre. They could also ask for a synopsis, which is basically a summary of the entire book condensed to around three pages for a “Short Synopsis” or around ten pages a “Long Synopsis” they may or may not specify what kind of synopsis they want and you’re left to guess. A SASE is a Self Addressed Stamped Envelope, a lot of companies will not pay for postage to send you a rejection or an acceptance, so you need to send an envelope addressed to yourself with a stamp, even then some do not guarantee a response.

(3)    This is where I note the recommended mode of sending the query by email. Most agencies and publishing companies get a lot of spam, so even if they don’t require it, it’s best to put QUERY in the subject line of your email, with your book title. Most of them are paranoid of viruses, and do not open attachments, so anything that they ask you to send along with the query you should paste to the email, they will most often request it but even if they don’t, you should do it anyways. Some will guarantee a response and will ask you to email another query after a given period of time, because if you didn’t get a response, they accidentally deleted it, or it got lost. Most are not so kind. Most of them will give you a time span of days to expect a reply, and then if they exceed it, you are to assume it to be a refusal.

So, this is how I start my query letter adventure, I think this post is long enough for one day, I’ll be posting more on this subject another time.

Friday Report and Comforting Quotes

I just got the email from the agent that contacted me last week and long story short she is not going to represent my manuscript. So, while I’m disappointed, I’m ready to get back to sending out query letters again, and I came to the realization that whoever said that writers are fools, masochists, and crazies was right. Now, I was unable to find the right quote because I have no idea who said it, but I did find these, so enjoy!

Writer's were supposed to be a little crazy." ~S.E. Hinton

He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.” ~ Oscar Wilde

Perhaps I wasn't going crazy after all. Perhaps I was just becoming a writer." ~ Janette Rallison (Just One Wish)

"Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what?" ~Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)

"I have great faith in fools - my friends call it self-confidence." ~ Edgar Allan Poe

"Every writer, without exception, is a masochist, a sadist, a peeping Tom, an exhibitionist, a narcissist, an 'injustice collector' and a depressed person constantly haunted by fears of unproductively." ~ Edmund Bergler

"The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story. Sometimes we try to protect them from getting booboos that are too big. Don’t. This is your protagonist, not your kid." ~ Janet Fitch

"A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it." ~ Ronald Dahl

"I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools…Let's start with typewriters." ~ Solomon Short

Preparation

It’s been almost a week since I got an email from an agent saying she was interested in see my book A Slice of Life Death. My jubilation has finally begun to wear off, and I have begun to prepare myself for the worst-case-scenario: a rejection. She told me to put sending out my query letters to other agents on hold for at least a month to give her enough time to read it and then come to a decision. At the time I thought a month would be no big deal. Now I’m wondering if I’ll be able to keep my sanity for that long! Just to give you a peek into my head right now it sounds something like this: “What if I wait all of this time just to get a rejection? Then all this time I spent waiting is wasted and I could be working on finding some other agent who wants my work.” “But then” another part of me says “if there is someone else would will want my book it doesn’t really matter when I send it, they will still be a interested in it now as they will be later.” “But what if I wait on a query and I catch them in the wrong mood? What if they need to see it now in order to like it?” “In that case I won’t ever know about it now will I?” “Exactly!!”
So, you see my problem? If you don’t, then just keep in mind that these inner conversations are ten times louder and faster than you can read them, and in the background there’s voice just screaming. Then there’s another voice that is telling the other voices to be quiet, and let me write!
Until I get the yes, or no from the agent, I’m going to do my best to distract myself with writing on my various other projects, getting a job, getting my driver’s license and cleaning the house. Let’s hope it’s enough.

Agent, First Contact!

As a new writer, I view agents as elusive creatures, and nearly impossible to please. Yes, I said “nearly” today, I finally intrigued somebody! An agent from Pippin Properties Inc, who wishes to see my A Slice of Life Death book no less! She asked if it were possible for me to hold off on sending queries to other agents for a month to give her time to receive the manuscript and read it before coming to a decision on whether or not she will want to be my agent. I am so excited! Finally a personal response! The last time an agent took the time to personally email me, it was to critique my query letter! I messaged her back saying I would gladly postpone sending out more queries as she requested, and was more than willing to send her the manuscript. I enquired in what form would be best to send the work, and I am presently waiting for a reply. This is so exciting! That is my entire report for the week; I figured that's more than enough suspense for one blog.

A Collection of Death Stories

I think I’m finally ready to write then send out some query letters for “A Slice of Life Death”. I’m usually nervous at this point in the process, but after receiving so many “no” and non-replies from other agencies on my other books that were, in my opinion, so much better than this book, that I can’t even work up the energy to get nervous. I’ve decided it’s just not worth it. That’s not to say, I’m not going to give writing my query my best shot or anything like that. I’m just not nervous anymore; I’m not giving up either, so that’s got to be a good thing, right?
If anybody knows any name for agent or publishing houses that publish collections of short stories, let me know with a comment on my blog and that’d be great! Thanks!