This author journey circles back to something I wrote almost three months ago, tips on surviving the Query Letter Blues. As mentioned previously, Query letters get sent to lit agents requesting they review and consider your work for representation/publication. Your query letter – like your love life – is only as good as the response it gets. Writers agonize over these little morsels of creativity. In the process, you learn a little about your work and a lot about yourself.
Ten query letter drafts later … I have a query letter draft that passed muster over at /r/pubtips on Reddit. Yes, Reddit is still Reddit, but there seem to be no other resources for near-real-time feedback on your query letter. So, despite my concerns, to Reddit I must go. Here, for your reference, is the Mike.Sierra.Echo query letter:
Twelve-year-old Mike doesn’t know how Mom managed to keep it all together. Now that she’s gone, everything falls apart. His grades are in the toilet, his unemployed dad disconnects from the family. Even his older sister Jennifer self-destructs on social media.
Grandma makes it worse, swearing revenge on Dad out of grief, using her wealth to sabotage his new job building the world’s first space elevator. Mike’s attempts to play peacemaker, Mom’s previous role, make everything worse. Mike feels helpless, even with an AI as his best friend, to stop Grandma’s sabotage of the family’s future.
Mike knows that saving the space elevator means stealing it. He sets off on the adventure of a lifetime with his trusty AI best friend at his side. He’s the first kid to pilot a space elevator, and the best person to save his family from itself.
Mike Sierra Echo is a middle-grade scifi space novel set in Boston, Santa Fe, and Ecuador 150 years in the future and will appeal to readers of ‘We Dream of Space’ by Erin Entrada Kelly and ‘Rebecca Reznik Reboots the Universe’ by Samara Shanker.
Whew! Hours of time spent on these four paragraphs – research among my author friends tells me that I’m not the only one who struggles to write query letters. Ergo, when I started this project out, I told myself two things. A. Just say thank you to the feedback – don’t argue about it – just take it and re-write. B. People will use your request for feedback to get into your head and it’s okay to ignore them.
That strategy worked! I approached the work knowing I’d be re-writing and, because a query letter *isn’t* your project, I don’t really care if people hate it. Take all the emotion out – write and re-write again – it’s all good.
Having said that, let me pass along some lessons learned that I’ll be incorporating into the Creative Persons Survival Guide at some point.
Tips on Writing Your Query Letter
Let me share one tip that helped me get my earlier query letter drafts into a better place: https://www.querylettergenerator.com/ This is a Mad Libs-style query letter generator that forces you to think about your story in ‘what-does-a-lit-agent-really-care-about’ format. That’s not to say your query letter SHOULD come from this generator – but it’ll give you a place to start from. Very useful.
Second tip: go back to what I said earlier – NOBODY likes writing query letters. It’s okay to hate them. Give yourself permission. Just write. Tell yourself the two things: A. Just say ‘thank you’ to the feedback – don’t argue about it – just take it and re-write. B. People will use your request for feedback to get into your head and it’s okay to ignore them.
I hope these query letter tips are useful for authors. I’ll add some more to the story when I get my thoughts together. Meantime, I’ve updated the Mike.Sierra.Echo page so that any visiting lit agent should be able to see what we’re doing almost instantaneously. Feel free to message me with any referrals into the pub industry you have to share.
Write on!
