When Sarah and I first realized that we would have
to start formulating a Query letter to send out to agents the first thing I did
was Google them. Duh, trusty ‘ol
Google knows everything. I clicked on the top search pulling up a website
(which I can’t for the life of me remember the name of) that said: a query is
basically just what you read on the back of a book.
I gave my computer - AKA the green box with buttons
- a smug smile. This was going to be a piece-of-cake.
I whipped out my trusty notebook and jotted down the
perfect “hook”. I think it was something like: In a world where…blah, blah,
blah. But man I thought it was A. MA. ZING!
As the weeks turned into months we did more research
on the “perfect” query. Stalking agents on twitter and their blogs, reading
interview after interview, writer blog after writer blog and of course reading
every last sample query on Query Shark. OK. So this was going to be a teensy bit harder than I thought.
It wasn’t a big deal that on almost every agent blog/interview they said
they hated queries that started “In a world where…” No problem, just cut it.
We’d already cut thousands of words from our MS so this was no different.
We were still going to barf this puppy out in a
matter of days. Right?
Wrong. The query is the first thing that every agent/publisher you submit to sees. It’s the
face of your precious baby MS that you’ve spent months/years/decades writing.
Your tears - and possibly those of your friends/family members - are in that
sucker. So, for me, the hardest thing was accepting the fact that the query
would take us weeks/months/a year to
perfect.
Holy cow! This was almost harder than the actual
story we had been writing/perfecting for what seemed like forever.
I think it actually took us four or five drafts to
even have an acceptable rough draft of a query letter to start building on.
Now here’s where I remind you that at that point
Sarah was working 5pm to 5:30am three days a week and I was working 6:30pm to 3am
four days a week. So we were basically walking zombies who barely had the
energy to pop a waffle in the toaster for our kids, let alone come up with this
elusive “perfect” query. AND! When we did muster up the energy to have more
than two cohesive thoughts in a row we had a MS to edit/perfect/change/WRITE!
It has now been at least ten months since that first
query was born. Since then we’ve had major mistakes, a few arguments and
countless drafts cross the screen of the green box.
Just the other day I had a random thought: “Hmmm
maybe we need to re-visit our query?”
Don’t lose hope. The perfect query is out there but
you have to work for it.
Or maybe (like Sarah & me) you just keep
changing it and sending out different drafts to every single agent you query.
Here are just a few of the blogs that kept us from
ripping our hair out:
Tell us about your query struggles. It makes us feel
better.
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