Writing a book is easy. Writing a query letter – that’s hard.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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).<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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<\/em>, but they all seem to agree on the content<\/em>.<\/p>\n 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!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Continue reading