#querying

Great news! I'm procrastinating!

So, listen. I love queries. It took me a long time to love the art of writing one but now I'm so extremely up my own ass about it I'm a human Möbius strip.

First and foremost, gonna drop the link to Query Shark again. Janet Reid was a pretty legendary agent, and on this blog, she specifically calls out what works and what doesn't and WHY. To your purpose: some of the entries are on queries that have been critiqued, revised, and resubmitted.

Second: Query letters and jacket copy (the summary on the dustcover or back cover) have largely the same anatomy, in genre fiction. Outside of genre fiction, they let you get away with shit like "five friends reunite on the Alaskan coast after ten years and relive their journeys through heartbreak, addiction, illness, grief, and one of them sets fires."

The bones of a genre fiction query, on the other hand, are:

Introduce protagonist and their status quo

Explain the problem they will face in the book, and the consequences of failure to overcome it (aka conflict and stakes)

IDEALLY: incorporate a hook.

You can usually structure this as "Meet [Protagonist.] Protagonist must [do objective], or [consequences of failure] happens. HOWEVER. [Optional hook - we'll get into this below.]"

However, this is deceptively simple, so let's go through each point.

PROTAGONIST INTRODUCTION

Let's just get this out of the way. If you have multiple protags/POVs you're going to have to pick one to take the lead. Look at how dual-POV romance books structure their copy—it's usually something like "POV 1 is a fabulously wealthy scoundrel who has a problem for the first time in their life. [Abridged summary of problem.] POV 2 is a straight-laced, emotionally repressed bookworm who would never be caught dead with POV 1... if not for [problem that perfectly compliments POV 1's problem.]" The first introduction contextualizes the second.

Moving on! The point of the introduction isn't just to tell us who your protag is, it's to tell us why they are the conduit for this story. The real trick is doing this in a way that also communicates something about the setting and their status quo.

I'm going to use examples from my books to illustrate this. First, with The Merciful Crow:

As a chief-in-training of the Crow caste, sixteen-year-old Fie abides by one rule: look after your own. Her caste of undertakers and mercy-killers takes more abuse than coin from the gentry, but when her family is called to collect royal dead, she’s hoping they’ll find the payout of a lifetime.

We get Fie's ethos. Then the next sentence establishes why that matters while also positioning her place in the larger world, and ends with what she's seeking: money to protect her family.

By contrast, Vanja's introduction for Little Thieves is significantly longer:

Vanja Schmidt knows that no gift is freely given, not even a mother’s love―and she’s on the hook for one hell of a debt. Vanja, the adopted goddaughter of Death and Fortune, was Princess Gisele's dutiful servant up until a year ago. That was when Vanja’s otherworldly mothers demanded a terrible price for their care, and Vanja decided to steal her future back… by stealing Gisele’s life for herself. The real Gisele is left a penniless nobody while Vanja uses an enchanted string of pearls to take her place. Now, Vanja leads a lonely but lucrative double life as princess and jewel thief, charming nobility while emptying their coffers to fund her great escape. 

We get Vanja's ethos, but also an immediate open-ended mystery: what is this debt? The next sentence hints at the answer while illustrating the fantastical nature of the world and Vanja's place in it. The third sentence pushes us to sympathize with Vanja... but then presents a highly questionable act as her solution. Then the next paragraph lays out the consequences: Things are going (mostly) great for Vanja, but she's very alone.

Normally I'd cut this down and let you get this backstory in the book, but the key is, the penny drops (wink wink for anyone who's read LT) in the next sentence:

Then, one heist away from freedom, Vanja crosses the wrong god and is cursed to an untimely end: turning into jewels, stone by stone, for her greed.

Which brings us to bullet point 2:

CONFLICT AND STAKES

So now we know what the book is really about: Vanja's misdeeds have led her into a poetic curse that she has to break (conflict) or lose her life (stakes.) Everything that came before gives those weight. We have the surface level explanation of why she's been stealing instead of just cavorting around as a princess, why she has to solve this alone, why the god would choose turning to jewels as a punishment. We care about her losing her life because it sounds like she made a bad choice to get out of a bad situation!

By contrast, this section in The Merciful Crow's original query is much longer:

Instead, they find a still-living crown prince, his too-cunning bodyguard, and a common foe. To seize the throne, the murderous new queen has allied herself with the same violent faction that has terrorized the Crows for generations. The prince has never lifted a finger to stop them; the guard has never drawn a blade to protect a Crow – and now they expect the Crows’ help. They don’t expect Fie to name a price: she will smuggle the prince across the nation to his own allies before the queen hunts him down. She won’t even smother him in his sleep for ignoring her caste’s persecution. And in return, he will guarantee the Crows’ safety once he wears the crown.

This lays out bigger world-level conflict and stakes as opposed to LT's more personal stakes; it also provides a preview of the prickly character dynamics to come. Which is important when we get to....

THE HOOK

The hook is the special sauce. It's the oomph. It's the sentence you read in the summary and decide that book is going home with you. It's not necessarily a twist, but it's something that scratches your brain and makes you want to dive in.

In the TMC query, it's the last paragraph:

If Fie can keep the deal, she’ll bring an end to her people’s hardship. But with the queen’s brutal hunters on their trail, every step puts her family in greater danger, forcing Fie into the bloody truth of what it means to be a chief – and the sacrifices it takes to truly look after her own.

This takes the big world stakes and makes them personal and immediate. It's not "will she honor her creed of looking after her own" but rather "what does that look like when the promise of massive societal change comes at the expense of your immediate family."

In LT, the stakes are already very personal, so the hook is already in elements like her being the daughter of Death and Fortune, the hint of her 'stealing her life back' but winding up lonely, stuff that suggests inner conflicts. The last paragraph instead gives a hook-y deadline, and an addition of factors that will further complicate Vanja's efforts to save herself:

Vanja has just two weeks to figure out how to break her curse and make her getaway. And with a feral guardian half-god, Gisele’s sinister fiancé, and an overeager junior detective on Vanja’s tail, she’ll have to pull the biggest grift yet to save her own life.

Things like Gisele's sinister fiancé and the overeager junior detective are further communicating a sense of pursuit and danger, ramping up the stakes and the hint of shenanigans needed to evade them.

Here's some examples of hooks you could throw on fairytales, as an illustration:

Little Red Riding hood, but Little Red opens the door to her grandma's house for the wolf

Sleeping Beauty, but the briars are actively spreading every year Aurora is asleep—but when she's awoken early, the thorns grow faster

Snow White eats the poison apple on purpose, and the prince has to figure out why before he can break through the glass coffin—if he even should.

This is all quite long, but here's some bits of advice to wrap it up:

Truly read through the Query Shark archives

Look at if your query has the basic elements of "Introduce protagonist, say what they want to do, say what's in their way, say what happens if they fail, ideally throw in flavor about the price of success."

Read the jacket copy for your favorite books, and/or books that are similar to yours. (If you think no book is similar to yours, read more widely, haha, because also: comp titles! Oh god I need to talk about comp titles.)

COMP TITLES

I was about to wrap this up but this needs to be a separate point. Comp titles are the part in your query where you say "my manuscript is [title] meets [title.]" Three big suggestions here:

One of those titles needs to be something published in your desired genre and age category within the last three years. You need to show you are actively reading in this genre.

Avoid major properties. Game of Thrones? Nope. Star Wars? Forget it. Hunger Games, Harry Potter, Twilight, Divergent, Throne of Glass, Six of Crows, Squid Games, everyone is using those comps and it becomes meaningless. Also used to be common wisdom to stick strictly to books, BUT...

The best thing you can do, and the exception to no. 2 in its entirety, is calling out a specific trait/element your manuscript has in common with a comp title. So let's say I'm writing a humorous adult fantasy about uhhhhh a young stern political activist lobbying for a new categorization of magic to be recognized by Magic Parliament. I'd comp it as "A prickly-but-principled heroine like Emily Wilde navigating the very human politics of a fantastical West Wing." Or hell, let's take two of our big name properties: "Game of Thrones meets Twilight" tells us nothing. "Twilight's all-consuming romance meets the deadly, high-stakes political machinations of Game of Thrones" is cooking with gas.

Congratulations! Your hard work has resulted in a manuscript, and you’re ready to share it with the world. You probably fall into one of two camps right now.

You’re so excited that you’re done, and you’re ready to hit submit! You’ve been writing and researching for months, or even years, and you’re confident in your work. You give yourself five stars, and you can’t wait to see everyone you know agree.

You’re stressed that you’re done with the initial manuscript, because what do you do now? You’ve heard big words like “queries” and “copyrights,” and you’re pretty sure you’re supposed to hire an editor. You almost wish you were still writing; at least you know how to do that.

Either way, take a breath and celebrate your hard work so far. This is a huge accomplishment! There are lots of steps to go, but they’re not as difficult as you may be fearing. Second things second (the first was celebrating)—getting the necessary information so your upcoming decisions are informed.

You might associate the word “editing” with the phrase “kill your darlings,” or maybe you dread the price tag on a professional edit. You’re not alone. Many writers balk at editing and choose to either edit their work themselves or pay a bare minimum to their cousin’s nephew.

The good news is, editing is not for ripping your writing into pieces against your will, nor is it for draining your wallet. A good editor will cooperate with you to make your manuscript the best it can be while preserving your vision, and there are many ways to make the process more affordable.

There are many stages of editing. After evaluating the types of edits and your current manuscript, you will be better suited to choose what’s right for you.

Self-Editing

Self-editing comes before everything else. For readers to understand your story, some basic housekeeping needs to be done first. At minimum, make sure your spelling is (mostly) correct, you’ve used punctuation (including quotation marks around dialogue), everything is split into paragraphs (you need a new one every time someone new speaks!), and you’re consistently in past or present tense from the same character’s point of view. You’re not trying to cross every T, just making sure the writing is good enough that it doesn’t hinder the story.

Alpha Reader

An alpha reader is not an editor, but someone who reads your story very early in the writing process. They’re your first audience and will give you big-picture feedback on whether the story makes sense, if the characters are believable, and if anything is confusing. This is like story validation—your alpha reader will help you understand whether you’re telling the story you meant to tell and whether readers will enjoy it.

Manuscript Evaluation

Also called story critique, manuscript assessment, and editorial assessment, an evaluation is a multi-page report on major story elements like your plot, pacing, structuring, characters, dialogue, and more. It doesn’t include in-document changes, but is a separate developmental-level document to help you figure out what needs to be changed.

Beta Readers

A beta reader is not an editor, but represents an average reader who will tell you what they think worked and what didn’t. Much like an alpha reader, they’ll give big-picture feedback, but slightly more zoomed in. Where an alpha read assumes the story is going to change significantly, beta reading focuses on plot holes (etc.) that are still large-scale issues but won’t override the whole manuscript.

Developmental Edit

A developmental edit suggests changes in the structure and narrative of a manuscript. Your editor will look for genre conventions, story logic, organization and restructuring, character arcs, and emotional payoff. Changes will be made in-line for scene-level edits, as well as a chapter-by-chapter report that addresses pacing and flow, as well as plot and character development.

Line Edit

After the story is complete and solid, a line editor will help make sure your writing is effective, sharp, and clear. Your editor will work with word choice and syntax, tone, consistency, and reorganize phrases to make your manuscript smoother and more consistent. Where previous stages have made sure the story is engaging, line editing makes sure the writing is engaging.

Copy Edit

Copy editing works to perfect your language technically. In this stage, errors in spelling, grammar, and punctuation will be corrected, along with stylistic consistency and tense usage. If you’ve used written numbers in some places and spelled them out in others, your copy editor will fix it.

Proofread

After all other editing, proofreaders focus on technicalities such as sentence fragments, comma splices, typos, and all other word-by-word edits that have thus far slipped through the cracks.

Whew! That seems like a lot, but not every manuscript needs every type of editing, and many editors offer multiple services in a single package. For example, copy and line editing are commonly done in the same pass. In the coming articles, we’ll be addressing some of the most frequently asked editing questions from new (overwhelmed) independent authors.

How do I know what type of editing I need?

Where do I get beta readers?

How do I find an editor anyway?

I’m scared for people to read my work.

I can’t afford any of this!

~Allison of Sigmon Editorial

Why I Don't Outline Before I Write The First Draft - Tony DuShane