Fire precedes the launch...
In this post I will address my experience writing a Query Letter and Synopsis, and the research involved identifying potential literary agents. 😊 This is a highly necessary, though painful step.
Taking deep breaths and letting it out slowly…. I can’t say that I’ve ever spent more hours agonizing over 250 words than I did writing my query letter. I didn’t keep track, but I figure it had to be well over 60 hours (research and writing combined). No joke… no exaggeration. Why is it painful? Try condensing a 180,000 word manuscript down to 250 words, and write it in a manner that will attract the interest of an agent/publisher and justify the two thousand plus hours you’ve spent writing your story.
Fortunately, I had help and feedback during the agonizing journey. But there is nothing to say that it’s over. I could very well be facing multiple rejections and may have to contemplate reworking the letter and manuscript (ms).
The online writing community that I actively participate in has a thread aptly named Query Letter Hell (QLH). The purpose of QLH is to provide educational resources for writing a proper query and the opportunity to post a draft of your query for feedback. Other writers will then critique your letter and provide valuable feedback on the does-and-don’ts along with suggestions for polishing the draft. After doing my homework, I think I posted four drafts on QLH before I finally ended up with something I felt good about.
Just so that the uninitiated can fully appreciate the importance of a query letter, allow me to explain. A query letter is a business letter that serves as an introduction to a prospective literary agent. I choose not to offend anyone by claiming that I know all the work that an agent does, but putting it simple, the agent has the publishing connections to prepare, promote and sell a ms to a publisher. The query letter serves to introduce the premise of a writer’s story and attempts to attract the agent’s interest in reading the ms and subsequently offering representation. There are other approaches to publishing, but a literary agent is a pretty critical relationship in a writer’s publishing success, and that’s not to diminish anyone who has gone the self-publishing route. I applaud anyone who has found success via self-publication.
Having blathered on long enough, let’s get to how I approached the work of a query letter…
Do your homework by researching the purposes, format, does/don’ts, and approaches for writing a query letter (I’m sure I am missing something).
Read other letters, break them down, understand what makes for a successful letter and not.
Critique other letters, read the critiques of other writers, and educate yourself on what makes for a good query letter.
Write your letter, review it, balance it against what you’ve learned, then edit it. When you think you’ve finally created a masterpiece, submit it to your peers for critique - I used QLH
I thought I wrote a pretty good letter and came out of QLH understanding the multiple flaws embedded in my letter. As I stated above, I posted 4 times on QLH and have TWELVE different drafts of the letter.
Rework the letter again, revisit your notes, review the guidelines, read more letters, offer more critiques, and resubmit your next letter to your peers.
Wash, rinse, and repeat until you have a compelling letter that really sells your story.
The dreaded Synopsis. I know I’m being a little dramatic. With anything difficult it takes time and effort to overcome. What starts out as difficult becomes easier as you go. Work hard, do your homework/research, eat your veggies, and don’t let it keep you up at night.
I found a really nice 11 step tool for building a synopsis at http://www.publishingcrawl.com/2012/04/17/how-to-write-a-1-page-synopsis/ I followed the steps and came up with a really good backbone for my synopsis. I beefed it up a little, worked through the flow, and came up with a reasonably good Synopsis. No, I did not submit it for critique.
The big difference between a query letter and a synopsis is a query is 250 words and contains the premise of your story and a hook to capture the attention of the agent. The Synopsis is 500-1000 words in nature, it builds on the promise of the query by covering the central plot and characters, marching through to the end of the story. So basically follow the central character arc and those things that motivate his/her decisions and write it as a compelling short story version of your book.
Researching Agents:
Take your time researching the appropriate profiles of agents. They look at hundreds of queries per week, so don’t waste anyone’s time by submitting a SFF story to someone who reps Romance. There are many resources you can use to understand their interests and wish lists. I used querytracker.net and manuscriptwishlist.com (MSWL) to find agents by genre. I searched through about 300 agents and created a list of 86. Then I took my time looking through each profile and color-themed each agent by how close I thought we aligned on interests. This narrowed my list to 24.
Using that list of 24 I looked at everything possible to understand the agent. Remember, you are looking for a long term relationship so you will want to understand what makes these people tick. I read through the following items:
The Agent’s Literary Agency website. I read their profile to understand their preferences. I found one agent who really enjoys the fantasy genre, but when I researched her more closely, I found that she covers MG and YA, not adult fantasy. So I moved her off my list.
Search for any interviews conducted with the agent - gold mines of info.
Look at their MSWL to gain more insight.
Find the authors they represent. Try the Agency website or use the client tab on Querytracker under the agent’s name.
Peruse the works of each author to see how well they match your genre. See who published the book. Read the sample pages provided. I found one author who said he represented adult fantasy, and yet the vast majority of his authors wrote children’s stories. Which is great stuff, it just doesn’t align with me.
I will volunteer that I have not found representation as of the date of this posting. I am on the cusp of sending out my query letters. Wish me luck and fair weather.
Note - I will post the results of query efforts at a later date, and assuming I am successful, I will add my query letter below. Until then….