Writing a book is easy. Writing a query letter – that’s hard.
Since my memoir is complete and I haven’t found any further tweaks to make, I decided to start marketing my work. My first target was a specific agent recommended to me by Norman Ollestad. Well, the agent’s submission guidelines were vague, to say the least, so I sent off what I thought sufficient to explain what I was up to. My first submission yielded nothing (though I spotted a spelling error on the subject line which is what probably caused my request to be DOA). I tried again and got a single, brief visit to my website, and then nothing.
I did some more research and was pointed to another agent, Nathan Bransford. I was so impressed with all the information on his site (http://nathanbransford.com/) that I decided to contact him directly in a less than formal way and asked for help. I was hoping at the least he’d help me with sharpen my approach or, at best, accept my work. Unfortunately, he did neither, and I wondered if I might have offended him in some way (of course the reality is that he’s extremely busy; I’m just not accustomed to it yet).
From his page I found Betsy Lerner’s blog, and she has an “Ask Me” link. So I contacted her and, well, asked some questions. Again I got a visit to my website and then…nothing. Hmm…is this a pattern I see emerging? This time it’s been less than 24 hours so who knows – I’m probably just being impatient.
On the plus side, the lack of an immediate, positive response has caused me to devote many brain cells to honing the all-important query. I went back to Nathan’s page and studied the query letter information there. I then searched online for comparative notes and discovered there is no single silver bullet in terms of order, but they all seem to agree on the content.
So, after all those millions of brain cells valiantly gave their all, I now have the two most important paragraphs of my query letter. The third (the one where one is supposed to list their prior achievements) – well, as a first time author (prior magazine articles and such don’t count unless they are specifically pertinent to the book) this section is currently blank. That just means I have more research to do. Yeah, that’ll work, at least for the time being!