Snow day! W00t! Since the kids were let out early, I feel like I won a half a day off! (Of course I didn’t, I’m using sick time because it’s my turn to take a snow day, but whatever, I’m still sitting on the couch with a fleece blanket at noon!! Yippee!!) The boys have their homework and chores done, and are happily playing Nintendo DS. All looks good for a few hours of writing time…
Thought I’d check out the blogosphere before I got started and found a little flurry of excitement over query letters at Nathan Bransford’s blog and Pubrants. I guess some folks have a problem with getting help with your query letter – namely, letting someone else write it for you. Why is this? Well, I can understand someone thinking “unfair” initially because maybe they hadn’t thought of it, or maybe because they didn’t have a query letter genius friend offering to write theirs up for them. But honestly, who said publishing is fair? And isn’t the entire industry all about good books, and connections and networking and all that jazz? Aren’t those connections one of the major reasons you want an agent to begin with? You need someone to help you get your good book to someone who has the power to buy it!
Query letters are a bitch. I’m guessing that gobs of really great writers suck at writing them. It still takes me months to draft one – beginning when I begin the book, tweaking it here and there as the story develops, and then rewriting it almost daily when I hit submission mode. I don’t have that many multi-published friends, so I don’t know for sure if my query is good until I get requests. And while I hate being weeded out on the basis of my query letter sucking, it happens. I don’t want to steal someone’s thunder just because they had the good fortune of a great query letter writer offering to help them – after all, to get sold, they also had to have a good book. I’ve had another person pitch for me to her agent and got 4 requests and an open door to resubmit off that – is it unfair that I never had to open my mouth except to say “thanks” and “can I have your card?” I hope not. I like to think it was that my book was good, and I just happened to be lucky enough to know this well-connected person who liked it.
Point is, the query letter is just one of several ways to get your foot in the door with your good book (I keep saying good book because an awesome query letter isn’t going to help you sell a bad one). Referrals, pitches, contests all play a part. Would we denigrate someone who enters a work into a contest to determine it’s flaws and then rewrites based on the feedback received? Would we call foul if the same person never even had to write a query letter because the editor received it in a contest? I just think we shouldn’t throw stones. We should just write a better book and look for more ways to get it out there.
