Amazon Affiliates thing is up. I do solemnly promise to only post links to books I have read and enjoyed and/or think are valuable. This will severely narrow down the list of things in the store, but what can you do?
Dear Rejecter,
I'm a writer who MAY be ready to send things to agents soon- after three drafts, it's with members of the writing group I belong to. I'm writing- and trashing draft after draft of- a query letter. I'm trying to figure out if the book reviews I'm doing count as a writing credit- I'm not getting paid and I only got the job because my cousin works there. But none of that is what's bothering me.
I keep getting the feeling I've missed something. So I was wondering if you could tell me the mistakes most people querying make- not necessarily the ones the nitwits would make, but the mistakes or stylistic errors people who clearly put time and effort into something tend to miss. Care to enlighten me before I start my rejection pile?
I don't really think it counts as a "writing" credit, but it's a publishing credit (provided it's a legitimate review group) and therefore worth mentioning.
As for the second question, I have to say I get this a lot, and I answered it pretty early in the blog: Two paragraphs describing your novel, one paragraph listing word count, title, genre, and any credits, and don't do anything gimmicky or stupid. It's not harder than that, though that is pretty hard.
Sadly, mistakes generally fall into two categories: querying an agency that doesn't handle that genre (which would account for about half of my rejection pile), and not having a good novel in the first place, which admittedly is pretty hard to tell if you're the writer.
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3 comments:
Oddly, that was one of the most invigorating things I've read in a while. Thank you!
As for the second question, I have to say I get this a lot, and I answered it pretty early in the blog: Two paragraphs describing your novel, one paragraph listing word count, title, genre, and any credits, and don't do anything gimmicky or stupid. It's not harder than that, though that is pretty hard.
Agreed, but you left out one paramount point: "And you must make the agent want to read your entire manuscript." That's the hardest part of all.
If you have thick skin, you can try Evil Editor's blog
http://evileditor.blogspot.com
Or the Absolute Write Water Cooler
http://absolutewrite.com/forums
Go to the Share Your Work subforum at Absolute Write; it will ask you for a password. Fortunately, the password is either above the dialogue box that pops up or is contained within the dialogue box itself.
These are 2 critiquing places which will give you some good ideas as to what is working/not working with your query letter. The first one is quite humorous, and, yeah, I post there from time to time. :-) The 2nd website is one I also frequent, but it's a bit more serious in tone (and your query letter won't be seen except by those who've registered for the site, hence the password).
Good luck with your query letter. I know how hard they can be to write.
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