Help Please! The query letter - looking for advice.

[popparazzi]

@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.

 

[Paul Whybrow]

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!

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.”

 

[ghuffman]

@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...

 

[Haze O'Hagan]

I feel like writing my book was the easy part.

 

[Haze O'Hagan]

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!

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.