The Dreary Query

The hardest thing about getting published so far for me has been hooking an agent. Now there is a common belief among the Un-Published that you don't need an agent, that you just write your book and submit it to a publisher and yadda-yadda-yadda a big fat check shows up at your door.

Sure that might happen on occasion, but you have a better chance of winning the lottery. I don't have that kind of luck. So I've been going the agent route. It took me a year of sending query letters to agents for THE SWEET SIXTEENTH to learn anything about querying. No matter how much I read about the subject, I was still making mistakes.

Since I started to send out queries for HUMBLE WALKER, I was pretty confident that I had gotten it right. But sadly I was still making the same mistakes. I had a great query (or so I thought) that conveyed the tone of the book and the overall story. A few agents passed right off the hop which I expected. But then something hit me while reading The Query Shark's blog. The "voice" of the query was all wrong, it was too dark. It was as if an announcer was reading the query, and not the voice of any character from the novel. Lucky for me I only burned about five agents with this query.

Once I got the voice right (I hope) I sent the query to two agents. Shockingly, I got two rejections, on the same day they were sent. That was a strange thing, and it made me think there was something wrong with the query right off the bat. So I started doing more research, and it hit me. In an effort to show some color in the character's personality, I used the word "bitch" to describe another character. Dumb move. I could not believe I did it. It was something I read before and must have forgotten.

We will see how the new query works. I've sent it out to five more agents but have not heard back from any yet. Meanwhile I've continued to refine it for the next five agent burst.