Category Archives: queries

December 21, 2010   DG&B   advice, fun, holidays, queries, Stephanie  
4

As these age things go….

by Stephanie

What can I say? With four days left until Christmas, my brain is admittedly floating somewhere near the ledge of the ninth floor window next to my desk. However! Before I escape to the land of fried desserts and chocolates more commonly known as my home, I wanted to pass along this great interview with Kody Keplinger. Her debut novel The Duff, is a contemporary young adult work that has received strong reviews since its release in September. But what is more notable about Keplinger’s career is that The Duff came out when she was only eighteen, an accomplishment that admittedly doesn’t happen too often. I guess the first thing that came to mind as I read this was the influence something like age can have on one’s writing. Certainly, being eighteen puts Keplinger in a unique position to write about common issues surrounding high school students. Which led me to wonder about the ways in which a person’s writing evolves over the years. Could you imagine yourselves being published, or completing a full novel for that matter, at age eighteen? Do you think your current work-in-progress would have the same feel had you written it during your teen years? Certainly I’m inclined to say no to the latter question, but I’m curious as to the nuances and evolutions you have found in your own writing styles and methods as time has passed. What do you feel is the same, different, etc?

So my parting gift to you this Christmas is the renewed mantra to continue writing, revising, and querying. It’s all an ongoing process that takes practice and dedication…but you already knew that. Wishing everyone a relaxing and productive holiday break, and I look forward to seeing your material in the New Year!

December 20, 2010   DG&B   advice, fun, Lauren, queries, what we're looking for  
4

Three tiny kids and a guy

by Lauren

Looking up some contact information in our database, I was reminded of my very favorite thing about it: small notes, devoid of context, that give a strange glimpse into our conversations with editors.  The stand out stars of the “notes” section of our contacts are surely that one editor has “three tiny kids” and another (whose name is not one you’d come across often) “is a GUY!”  I like to imagine the shock and surprise of the assistant who’d picked up the phone to discover a deep, masculine voice attached to a name he or she had previously assumed belonged to a woman.  (I also am not entirely certain that one wasn’t me, back when I was Jane’s assistant an alarmingly high number of years ago.)  I also imagine the kindly editor who sat across from one of my colleagues at a lunch meeting and showed off pictures of her miniature children, perhaps posed next to objects of regular stature for comparison purposes.  That note has been in there long enough that the tiny kids are probably not so tiny any more.

Most of the notes, though, are actually quite useful—such and such a person is obsessed with dogs or used to be a ballet dancer or absolutely cannot stand misery memoirs. When we submit our projects, we’re working not only on the parameters of a publisher’s and editor’s list and our personal interactions with them, but with the company’s collective knowledge of what makes them tick and gets them excited. Excitement is the huge intangible of the publishing process. And when we just happen to have a book about dogs or dance or misery, we know where to go—or where not to.

For authors looking for agents, I suspect the best resources out there are the blogs and websites and Twitter feeds and what have you of the agents themselves.  We do suffer sometimes from too many queries quoting our own bios back to us, sending us things that are far off base because they might have a common keyword.  I think all the agents who’ve been here a while have at one point or another edited a reference out of our descriptions of ourselves or our lists, because we found it led too many people down the wrong path.  But more often than not, these little factoids about us and our interests point people the right way.  While we do share queries amongst ourselves and know each other’s taste well, it’s always nice to look at a batch of newly arrived queries and see that several of them are on a subject that we’re already really enthusiastic about—it doesn’t guarantee success, of course, but a book on a subject that usually bores us has to be that much more amazing to even catch our eye.  Much as agents train themselves to see the difference between “I like this” and “this is good” (and “I don’t like this” and “this is bad”), we’re still human, and with all the reading at night or on the weekends, it’s a real pleasure to come across the projects that we’d happily buy off the shelves if they had nothing to do with us.

So when you’re querying us, if it’s because an off-hand reference in one of our blog entries made you realize we just might be the right advocate for your book, please do let us know!  It always helps us to know why you wanted us to read your work.

November 19, 2010   DG&B   advice, opinion, queries, Stacey  
15

A tale of a successful query

by Stacey

We have been talking a lot about what our blog readers are looking for and how we might be better able to give it to them. Insights into our selection process seem to be well received, so I thought it might be a nice exercise to share with you (with the author’s permission) a query letter for a YA novel I recently signed up from the slush pile. What I’ll do is paste the letter below in its entirety and then comment on the letter itself below that to try to describe to our readers why it grabbed my attention and why I think it worked.

Here’s the pitch:

Three years ago Lexi Strauss was an ordinary freshman girl at Covington High. She had a dramaholic, boy-crazy best friend that she adored. And her biggest dilemma was figuring out how to get Xander, her older brother’s gorgeous best friend, to see her as more than just “Little Lexi.”

All those normal pieces of her life were stolen from her the night her family was murdered.

Now she has gruesome nightmares every night—reliving the horrific crime that she witnessed. The man in black, all the blood and screams and that metallic wrong smell…. She can’t tell anyone what really happened that night because what she did is almost as bad as what she witnessed.

Those first two years after it happened she lived in constant darkness. Even Aunt Jenny—her inveterately cheerful guardian—couldn’t bring her back into the light. When Lexi reunites with Xander the summer before her senior year, she can feel herself slowly start to heal. But when she returns to her old high school, it seems her family’s murder isn’t the only lingering mystery in Covington Hills.

She should’ve known the healing was too good to be true. No one gets away with murder…for very long, anyway.

The Killing Breed, 69,800 words, is a young adult novel. Thank you for your time and consideration. Pasted below is a brief synopsis and sample chapter. The full manuscript is available upon request.

Here are my comments on the pitch:

Three years ago Lexi Strauss was an ordinary freshman girl at Covington High. She had a dramaholic, boy-crazy best friend that she adored. And her biggest dilemma was figuring out how to get Xander, her older brother’s gorgeous best friend, to see her as more than just “Little Lexi.”

First, let me start by saying that opening line is a grabber. It’s filled with descriptive elements without being overwritten or overly wordy. It also has the right tone for a YA query, the same tone that I’d want to see in the book itself, using words and phrases that will resonate with younger readers. The query letter needs to be indicative of what the book will be, and having the right tone is important.

All those normal pieces of her life were stolen from her the night her family was murdered.

Shocking revelation, simply stated. Gets the facts out clearly and concisely, and sets up a big part of the plot. This has all happened in just four sentences. A lot of information in a brief pitch. Brevity is good.

Now she has gruesome nightmares every night—reliving the horrific crime that she witnessed. The man in black, all the blood and screams and that metallic wrong smell…. She can’t tell anyone what really happened that night because what she did is almost as bad as what she witnessed.

Here’s some more plot description, and it’s intriguing. But more than that it really tells us a great deal about the story, and about the main character. Incredibly descriptive with clear, concise prose.

Those first two years after it happened she lived in constant darkness. Even Aunt Jenny—her inveterately cheerful guardian—couldn’t bring her back into the light. When Lexi reunites with Xander the summer before her senior year, she can feel herself slowly start to heal. But when she returns to her old high school, it seems her family’s murder isn’t the only lingering mystery in Covington Hills.

This gives us even more detail about the timeline, about the key relationships in the book, and a bit more, but not too much, about the plot.

She should’ve known the healing was too good to be true. No one gets away with murder…for very long, anyway.

The voice is here again. It reads like what a kid going through this might think or say. Simply and matter of factly. Conversational.

The Killing Breed, 69,800 words, is a young adult novel. Thank you for your time and consideration. Pasted below is a brief synopsis and sample chapter. The full manuscript is available upon request.

Overall, this query works for me because it gives the reader a very clear picture of the tone of the book, and indicates that the voice is age appropriate. It offers enough detail about the plot to make it sound interesting and make the reader wonder what happens next. And it’s concise. There’s not one word or sentence that doesn’t have a pointful purpose. Think about flap copy—if you can’t pitch your book in the amount of space on the inside of a book jacket, neither can your agent or publisher! If you really feel the need to go into greater detail about the fine points of the plot, you can always include a synopsis, but the initial pitch should grab your attention and give you just enough to make you want more.

One final point on things I like to see in a query that were not included here. It’s always helpful to see that an author has researched me and my books, and then indicate that his or her project might suit my list as a result. That type of personal attention goes a long way in making something stand out. Also, it’s a good idea if you can come up with a valid comparison to another book or books in the marketplace that might appeal to a similar audience. Finally, a bit of background information about the author’s personal life, and any previous writing experience or credentials. All of it should be brief, and professional.

Hope this has been helpful. If you have any questions, ask away and I’ll do my best to answer them!

October 20, 2010   DG&B   memoir, Miriam, opinion, queries, reading  
7

Memoirs and Montaigne….

by Miriam

I’ve been beset and besieged by memoir queries of late. An inordinate number of them seem to focus on a bad/negligent/crazy mother and the lasting scars she inflicted on her child—in this case, the memoirist. As the parent of a precociously knowing five-year-old, I feel a level of sympathy for these maligned moms (we mothers don’t have a good track record when it comes to literary depictions of us by our offspring). I feel less sympathy for their whiny kids who not only blame everything that’s wrong with their lives on the poor women who spawned them but, worse yet, do it in ways that are both artless and, frankly, tedious.

Which got me thinking about why so many people write memoirs and why so few of them end up successfully published. Simply being the victim of physical or psychological abuse, real or perceived, doesn’t do it. Well crafted prose that lovingly explores the contents of one’s navel doesn’t either. Exotic experiences involving travel or bizarre encounters don’t guarantee a good read. Universal themes are a good starting point but don’t always add up to anything more than intellectual meanderings that either veer toward the Hallmark Card or obscure German philosopher ends of the literary spectrum. I’ve always felt that, like good fiction, a successful memoir is powerful, moving, charming, well-written, well-paced, and relatable in that been-there-felt-that kind of way, with a minimum of tiresome self-absorption (despite the fact that the subject is the self).

And then I came across this piece about the delightful Michel de Montaigne whose solipsism is, well, the whole point of his essays, and whose interest in the minutiae of everyday life is boundless. So, how come he still engages us across the centuries? And how come so many authors with more interesting life stories and horrible mommies fail so often to do so?

What makes you pick up a memoir? And what personal narratives are among your favorites?

September 29, 2010   DG&B   advice, platform, queries, self-publishing, Stacey  
2

Advice from a published author

by Stacey

While reading today’s AOL headlines, I came across this concise summary about getting published written by Lisa Johnson Mandell, a published nonfiction author. I don’t think she says anything we haven’t heard before, but it still bears repeating, and she does sum it up pretty nicely for the novice author. Plus she offers some direct advice from her reputable agent, which is valuable and right on target. The title of her piece is a bit misleading since she talks at the beginning about self-publishing a book, which she’s right might be easier than you’d think, but the suggestion that going the more traditional agent and publisher route is easier than you think is a bit of a stretch. It’s harder than ever in many ways with the market being so competitive, and finding an agent and publisher requires a lot of things to go write (a pun, not a typo). Enjoy!

September 24, 2010   DG&B   advice, fun, queries, Rachel, rejection  
4

How to be rejected

by Rachel

Back in May, Jane asked you guys what your biggest query mistakes were, and many of you were quite eager to share your horror submission stories with us. Hopefully reading those horror stories gave you a bit of advice on how to improve your queries.

But, if you’re looking for advice on how to turn an acceptance into a rejection, look no further than the staff over at Writer’s Relief, whose sarcastic tips for failing (or, succeeding—in receiving rejection letters!) are published on the Huffington Post.

My favorite tip for rejection has got to be taking it personally. There’s nothing like an author who gets politely turned down and then seeks payback!

Going through this list, what have you been most guilty of?

September 15, 2010   DG&B   fun, Miriam, opinion, queries, reading, submissions  
4

Boring is not a four-letter word…but it might as well be

by Miriam

This short piece in Salon (originally a letter in the Reading Club) last week got me thinking about boredom, specifically the kind of boredom that we publishing folks experience on an almost hourly basis. Of the thousands of queries and manuscripts that we sift through every year, a significant percentage suffer from a serious case of boring. The good stuff is exciting, thrilling, energizing, and…not boring. The very bad is tragic, hilarious, depressing, and baffling, but, again, not boring. Then there’s that other category of submissions: the inescapably, suffocatingly, mind-numbingly boring. For me, getting through these is the hardest part of my job. Saying “next” when it’s an unsolicited query or manuscript that’s dragging you down into the arms of Morpheus is one thing. It’s quite another when it’s a manuscript by a client or a client’s referral.

When it comes to explaining to a client why his or her novel doesn’t work, “Because it’s boring!” is not an option. You have to dig around for problems of plot, characterization, themes, etc., and that entails reading much more of the material than you can stay awake for without the aid of artificial stimulants. The biggest problem is, of course, that the book is boring, but people who will happily take eviscerating criticism about their prose style or their lack of character development would run you over with their SUVs if you mentioned the “B” word.

Which is why I was so amused by this phrase in axelrod’s letter regarding MFA workshop critiques: “If we didn’t like a piece, we could talk about anything but the one thing that mattered, the awful, dreaded taboo word: boring.” Heh. I know just what he means.

September 09, 2010   DG&B   fun, Jessica, opinion, queries, rejection  
7

Form rejections

by Jessica

Rejection got you down? Have a look at Judson Merrill’s post, which made me chuckle. Although JM’s waggish rejoinders to his assorted rejection letters are not, perhaps, the very model of gracious behavior, they do reflect a certain fighting spirit, plus an understanding of the absurdity of the submission/rejection process that is psychologically indispensable to any aspiring writer. That rejection is part and parcel of the writing life does not make it any less painful. Composing clever responses to form letters is not likely to advance an author’s cause or career, but it can offer a measure of comfort, humor, and a very necessary reminder that these letters, which are necessarily brief, impersonal, and devoid of actual, specific feedback, should be taken with a grain of salt.

Dear Mid-American Review,

Thank you for your recent rejection. I appreciate your taking the time to read my story. I understand how careful you must be in selecting a cohesive body of work to present in the MAR.

Your communiqué, however, did leave me with a few concerns. You write, “We have decided your submission is not a match for us at this time.” I assume this means I should submit my story again at a more convenient time. I don’t want to be a pest, though, so please provide a concrete timeline. Would you like to review the story again for your next issue or next year? Anything’s fine, just let me know.

Also, confusingly, you close that same paragraph with, “We wish you the best of luck placing your story elsewhere.” Typo?

Thanks,
Judson Merrill

How do you cope with rejections? How do you maintain perspective?

August 09, 2010   DG&B   about us, advice, From the Vault, Jim, queries, reading, submissions  
5

From the Vault: Reading explained

Happy summer, everybody!  For the next while, there are going to be some absences from the blog as we take vacations, but we’d hate to leave you guys hanging.  It’s no secret that we blog much more now than when we started this baby, and there are far more of you reading than there were way back when.  So we thought we’d bring back some blog entries of days gone by that you may have missed if you just joined us in the last year.  We’ve cued up enough, but if you have any favorites you think your fellow readers might enjoy, give us a shout below!

by Jim

Choosing what projects to take on can be a tricky thing. Given the number of manuscripts I usually have waiting to be read and how few of those I’ll actually be able to work on, I start each one assuming that I’ll be passing on it. For about 50 pages, I keep an eye out for the specific reasons I’ll be rejecting. I’m looking for overwrought writing, character inconsistency, sloppy plotting, and/or any reason to put the pages down and move on to something else.

Let’s say I pass page 50 and haven’t found a reason to definitely say no. I hit my optimistic reading phase and for the next 100 or so pages, I’m thinking, “Hook me!” I’ve invested just enough time that I won’t be upset if I end up deciding to pass, but I’m starting to think, “Hey, this could be my next new client.”

At page 150, my mood shifts entirely to, “Don’t let me down now.” Pessimism sneaks back in a bit. Even if I like this, I start to wonder, can I sell it? This is where I bust out the super handy trick that Jane taught me when I was starting out: if you can think of five editors you know who this could be right for, then it’s probably worth a shot. I ride the manuscript out keeping that in mind and also thinking about the competition. What similar books have done well? Are there too many similar books? Does this read like what’s working now, or does it read like what might be working a year from now when it would come out?

Of course, every so often, a manuscript comes along that shuttles my reading rules right out the window. And that is what I live for.

Let’s flash back to last summer. I drag a bag of manuscripts up to my roof, yank out the first one, open to the first page, read the first paragraph…and stop. It sounds so corny and over the top to say that you were hooked on something from the first page except that when it happens, it’s transporting. I read until the sun went down, and the next morning, I handed the manuscript to a colleague.

“Read a page and tell me if I’m crazy,” I requested. “I mean—this is really as good as I think it is, right?”

I fell so head over heels for the novel that I actually wanted confirmation I hadn’t just lost my mind. I felt stupidly luck to even have the project in hand. When the first page was read, I got the affirmation I needed: “It’s really that good.”

“Crap. Who else has this?” Luckily for me, though other agents did have and did want to represent the novel, its author, in her infinite wisdom, decided to work with me. The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan is an astonishing novel for the young adult market that blends the literary and the commercial, stunning writing with rich characters and brilliant plotting. I eagerly look forward to its publication by Delacorte next spring.

The point I always come back to is that people who work in publishing do so because they’re readers. Yes, I read with an eye toward market and potential profit. This is a business, and when you work on commission, you can bet that there’s always an eye on the bottom line. The most thrilling part of the job, though, is playing some role in ushering a book you feel passionately about into another reader’s hands.

At the delightful (and not just because you can gamble there) Las Vegas Writers’ Conference last year, someone asked a panel I sat on, “Would you rather have something come across your desk that has great writing or a great plot?” It’s an unanswerable question. Because I’m not looking for pieces of a good book. I’m looking for the whole package, or for someone who inspires me to believe in their ability to create the whole package.

In responses to rejection letters, understandably upset writers sometimes ask, “Who are you to judge me? What right do you have to say who’s good enough?” All I can answer is that I’m a reader. I’m an audience. And I want you to win me over as much as you want me to be won. It can’t happen always, but we hope it happens enough.

Originally posted in April 2008.

July 28, 2010   DG&B   advice, From the Vault, Miriam, queries  
2

From the Vault: Query perfection

Happy summer, everybody!  For the next while, there are going to be some absences from the blog as we take vacations, but we’d hate to leave you guys hanging.  It’s no secret that we blog much more now than when we started this baby, and there are far more of you reading than there were way back when.  So we thought we’d bring back some blog entries of days gone by that you may have missed if you just joined us in the last year.  We’ve cued up enough, but if you have any favorites you think your fellow readers might enjoy, give us a shout below!

by Miriam

The perfect query letter does not exist. (Well, perhaps it lives in the fantasy realm of unicorns and dragons, but certainly not in our day-to-day publishing world.) And, yet, everyone seems to be chasing the formula for that elusive, perfect query letter (EPQL) and its pursuit is giving a lot of people agita and heartburn. It’s a recurring theme during the Q&A portion of agent presentations at writers conferences. Many internet sites and print publications aimed at writers spend a lot of time on the subject and, in talking with individual authors, it seems that confusion about this subject is universal.

So, I will try to elucidate what makes a query effective — not perfect, mind you, just effective — for us here at DGLM:

1. It should be succinct and to the point. The purpose of this missive is to introduce yourself and your project and ascertain if the agent wants to take a look at your proposal/manuscript. It is not the place to go into longwinded detail about the weather, your passion for shell collecting (unless, of course, the book is about shell collecting), or your great-aunt Mary’s faith that you would one day be a published writer. It should, however, be no more than a page long and look and read like a letter not a report.

The first paragraph might mention how you came to query this particular agent and/or agency – perhaps noting that you saw a nice acknowledgement of the agent in a book you admired or you looked on the agency’s web site and identified with the agent’s profile somehow or anything that shows that you did your homework and that this is not just a form letter being sent to 6,000 agents.

The next paragraph should tell the prospective agent what the book is in a couple of sentences. Here is not the place to summarize your entire book. You want to highlight the strongest themes or the elements that make the book distinctive (e.g., “My novel tells the tale of star-crossed teenage lovers separated by their families’ bitter feud.” Not, “Romeo grew up in Verona and was part of the Montague clan. He met and fell in love with Juliet who was a member of the Capulet familiy and who spent an inordinate amount of time on balconies or talking to her nurse….”) Unless you’re very good at writing concise plot summaries, the less said the better. The idea is to get the agent to the actual manuscript.

The final paragraph should tell us anything relevant about you – this is your first novel or you’ve been published in numerous literary journals or John Cheever was your godfather or you’re a neurosurgeon who has an MFA from the Iowa writing program, etc. – and ask if you may send a sample of your project or the complete manuscript.

2. On the technical side of things: Spell check and then carefully proofread the query. We have had instances of great hilarity over a dropped letter in a strategic spot. Someone once queried us for a book about “pubic policy” and, juvenile bunch that we are, we didn’t stop laughing for days. You don’t want the query to go directly to the form rejections pile because of typos, grammatical errors or because you addressed the envelope to one agent and sent it to another.

It’s okay to single space query letters – as you would any other letter – but it’s not okay to make your margins less than one inch wide and your font teeny tiny so that you can fit a three-page description into one page. Ease of reading is half the battle among us bleary-eyed publishing people. (Everything else in your submission package should be double spaced and single sided.)

Finally, unless you’re in prison, type your queries rather than handwriting them. One of my favorite queries of all time was a six-page handwritten saga describing the author’s genealogical connections to everyone from the British royal family to Lassie.

3. Did I mention doing your homework? If the agent you’re querying only represents science fiction and fantasy, don’t send him/her a query for a self-help proposal. That’s a waste of everyone’s time and postage, and there are so many places where you can find information on agents and publishers that it should be relatively easy to identify your target.

4. Use any edge you have. If you met one of us at a conference, lead with that. If your father went to school with one of our spouses, tell us that. Anything that helps us identify yours as something we should pay attention to is fair to include. Ultimately, it’s the actual idea and writing that will determine whether we offer representation, but that won’t happen if your query doesn’t make us request your material.

Caveat: Even if you follow my directions slavishly, there’s no guarantee that your query will be that EPQL we’re all looking for. As with everything else in this quixotic business, you can sometimes do all the wrong things and still end up with an agent and a book contract. And, conversely, you can do all the right things and not get your foot in the door. So, my advice is to better your chances by crafting as good a query letter as you can and then trust that your efforts and the strength of your work will pay off.

Originally posted in December 2006.

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