I’ve seen all sorts of query letter templates over the years, and most of them have been pretty dubious: but this one is marvellous, and comes to us courtesy of Joel Bruns at The Hub. It only really works for a certain sort of YA fiction, but I’m sure that given half an hour and…
Tag Archive: querying
Query Blasting: The Scattergun Approach
There are several organisations which will, for a fee, send your query to agents, editors and anyone else you ask them to. They usually do what they promise, and e-mail your information out to all the names on their mailing lists—and those lists can be vast, with tens of thousands of names on them. But…
There Are All Sorts Of Ways To Fail
When I worked as a full-time editor I was frequently amazed by the submissions that I received. I worked for a book packager which specialised in highly-illustrated esoteric non-fiction: we packaged books about retreat, meditation, religion and myth on behalf of publishers who didn’t have the time or the in-house expertise available to produce the…
Queryfail Two Is On Its Way!
Following the rather mixed success of the inagural round of Queryfail, which spawned Agentfail and stirred up so many people that even I blogged about it, Queryfail 2: Queries Never Die has been announced. It’s going to take place this coming Friday, April 17, and people are already twitching in anticipation. In all sorts of…
Queryfail?
Ten days ago Colleen Lindsay (who blogs over at The Swivet, and is a literary agent with the USA-based Fine Print Literary Management) organised Queryfail Day: a day-long Twitterfest. Colleen was careful to advise those taking part not to post anything which might indentify any of the writers whose queries were being discussed; and she…
Unsolicited Manuscripts
Most of the big publishers, and an increasing proportion of the smaller ones, state that they’ll no longer accept unsolicited manuscripts. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t submit to them: it just means that they have to solicit your manuscripts before they’ll even consider reading it. One way to arrange this is to write…