• Café Life is the Colony's main hangout, watering hole and meeting point.

    This is a place where you'll meet and make writing friends, and indulge in stratospherically-elevated wit or barometrically low humour.

    Some Colonists pop in religiously every day before or after work. Others we see here less regularly, but all are equally welcome. Two important grounds rules…

    • Don't give offence
    • Don't take offence

    We now allow political discussion, but strongly suggest it takes place in the Steam Room, which is a private sub-forum within Café Life. It’s only accessible to Full Members.

    You can dismiss this notice by clicking the "x" box

Help Please! The query letter - looking for advice.

Invest in You. Get Full Membership now.
Status
Not open for further replies.
@HayleyGF what an excellent recommendation - found the Query Shark's blog and have read a few of the reviews/comments. Made me laugh out loud, pulls no punches!
Keep going with the messages and you'll be into the Writers Group in no time. Your comments are appreciated.
 
I just spent the last couple of weeks reading the Query Shark archives, and I recommend it. She's an agent who chomps queries to bits and you get to see how she does it. It's been immensely helpful in learning how to craft one—I completely rewrote mine and think it's much better. Just a bit clunky yet, and I'm biding my time until I'm not such a newbie and can post in the Writers Group. Looking forward to getting some help and helping others.

It's the sad reality of an author's life in the 21st-century, that they aren't simply required to be a compelling storyteller, with all the attendant skills in spelling, punctuation, grammar, formatting and layout and design, but they also have to be skilled in writing queries and synopses, as well as blogging, social media posting and tweeting. Not to mention book cover design and mastering the administrative and financial regulations, if you go the self-publishing route by selling e-books online.

I've put my creative writing on hold in 2019, turning to the challenge of learning how to do these tasks, in an attempt to sell my novels. Already, I'm bewildered and bored. Last night, I spent three hours uploading edited versions of 45 titles to Amazon, the night before it took five hours to amend the books on Smashwords. I'm turning into a robot! o_O

It's further proof of what Gabriel García Márquez said about writing:

“Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry…Both are very hard work. Writing something is almost as hard as making a table. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood. Both are full of tricks and techniques. Basically very little magic and a lot of hard work are involved.”
 
@HayleyGF what an excellent recommendation - found the Query Shark's blog and have read a few of the reviews/comments. Made me laugh out loud, pulls no punches!
Keep going with the messages and you'll be into the Writers Group in no time. Your comments are appreciated.

Yes! This site though. I can't stop laughing, and sheepishly eyeing my 2016 query letter...
 
It's the sad reality of an author's life in the 21st-century, that they aren't simply required to be a compelling storyteller, with all the attendant skills in spelling, punctuation, grammar, formatting and layout and design, but they also have to be skilled in writing queries and synopses, as well as blogging, social media posting and tweeting. Not to mention book cover design and mastering the administrative and financial regulations, if you go the self-publishing route by selling e-books online.

I've put my creative writing on hold in 2019, turning to the challenge of learning how to do these tasks, in an attempt to sell my novels. Already, I'm bewildered and bored. Last night, I spent three hours uploading edited versions of 45 titles to Amazon, the night before it took five hours to amend the books on Smashwords. I'm turning into a robot! o_O

It's further proof of what Gabriel García Márquez said about writing:

“Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry…Both are very hard work. Writing something is almost as hard as making a table. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood. Both are full of tricks and techniques. Basically very little magic and a lot of hard work are involved.”

That's a scary quote; a refiners fire if you will.
 
Invest in You. Get Full Membership now.
Status
Not open for further replies.

Latest Articles By Litopians

  • Advertising and Social Media
    There has been much discussion in writing circles about how much a writer has to self-promote these ...
  • Future Abstract: Fights at Night
    SATIRE ALERT: The following abstract is entirely fictional and does not represent actual events or s ...
  • Great Novel Openings Quiz
    As writers, we all know how important it is to grip the reader from the very start. Intriguing, surp ...
  • In The Summertime
    In the early seventies, I had a semi-Afro hairstyle and a shaggy beard. . I thought I looked like th ...
  • Working with a Literary Agent
    The Querying In a previous post I mentioned that I was back in the query trenches. To recap, my earl ...
  • Danger! Danger!
    What is perhaps the most feared creature of the Borneo rainforest, I hear you ask? Who is the King o ...
  • The World Has Missed You
         May 2021… COVID lockdown restrictions had eased, so Mrs Treaclechops and I headed to the I ...
Back
Top