Queries – the missing link to the “crown”

Posted by Christine on Mar 30, 2010 in General, Publishing, Randomness | 1 comment

Update in the race for the status of Rejection Queen: No new rejection to report – my number is still at 1.

I currently have two outstanding queries.  One I’ll admit I don’t think I’m going to hear back from.  The other I’m right within the window of reply. So I should hear in the next week or two.

This weekend I worked on my query letter. This, of course, is the key to winning the Rejection Queen Crown. You see in order to accumulate rejections one must first send out queries. Without the query there can be no rejection. But, lets be positive here, without the query there can be no acceptance either. 🙂

I spent several hours perusing the web this weekend just reading queries. Yes I’ve done this before but I was looking for something different this time. Something elusive and almost intangible.

Hook.

I need a hook.

That one sentence that makes the agent need to read my book. I knew it wasn’t something I was going to find in someone else’s query but I was hoping that by studying others I could maybe learn what an agent was looking for in the hook. 

What did I learn?

No two query letters look alike. I read the ones agents accepted and posted to their blogs or web sites. Every single one was a bit different. They ranged in tone, style and depth.

So, while there are some hard and fast rules (like address the agent by the right name, stick to one page, identify your genre, stick to one page, hook the agent, stick to one page…), I’m thinking that there is a little more flexibility than I want to give myself.

The combination for a successful query might be more a cooking recipe, a pinch of this and a dash of that, than a scientific formula, one gram hook, three grams description, two grams personal background.

This is one area where I could really use a hard and fast formula that is guaranteed to work.