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Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Query Letters?

What on earth is a query letter?

This was my comment about two years ago when the idea to make an attempt at publication was put into my head. First order of business...find an agent. Okay, so how does one go about finding one of these elusive beings? Answer: A query letter.

Now I'm no expert...not even pretending to be. But for anyone who might possibly be in the same boat that I was in, here is my unsolicited teensy bit of help.

The bottom line is you want your letter to practically jump out of the slush pile. So start with a great hook and reel them in from there. The first part I was okay with. It was the rest of the letter that pretty much stunk. How do you sum up 100,000 words in one page and give a little snippet of yourself? Not a clue.

So.

After scouring the internet I found wonderful help on Nathan Bransford's blog post-
"Query Letter Mad Lib." Here and "Anatomy of a Good Query Letter." Here

Now, once you write and polish your letter to a beautiful shine. Click Here to head on over to the Query Tracker Forum where you can post your newly sparkling letter for the fantabulous members in the forum to critique. Scared? Dont be. This site is the gold mine that answered all my questions!

4 comments:

Lindsay said...

Ah the trauma of the query letter! I agree, I was like you when I started with the whole process. QT was an invaluable place for helping whip my letter into shape.:)

Renae said...

I would not have survived with out QT! (Still wouldn't!)

Lydia Kang said...

Love my QT peeps! Thanks for visiting my blog! I need to start reworking my query again soon....

Lisa Gail Green said...

So glad I no longer have to do that. I think query letters are harder than writing the book!