This time round I've been contemplating queries in the back of my mind for a while and I have a much better idea of how to do it. Really, that wouldn't take much. It was very bad.
I still don't think I'm great at it, but there was a Twitter pitch thing for The Knight Agency and since #FridayPhrases really got its claws into me I've felt so much more comfortable putting myself out there on Twitter than through any other medium. So I tweeted my pitch for two novel, just to see if there was interest.
There was interest in one pitch :)
Please note: this is the first time that I am aware of that any professional writing related person has given the slightest indication they think they might be interested in reading my works. I really hope it was for the alliteration because I was *so* pleased with how that felt!
Anyway. As soon as I'd done squeaking and rushing around in a panic, I suddenly realised I needed a query.
Whole new kind of panic. My old one would not suffice for reasons already discussed (principally its badness) and I didn't want to risk this opportunity. Speed reading of queryshark.blogspot.com gave me a top level frame. I went away and wrote my query. I went back to queryshark and read their responses to 60 more queries (there are a lot on the site). I looked for evidence of crimes in my own query and couldn't find any obvious ones.
With very little time on my hands I extracted some key points and scrubbed the rawness out of my query. I was quite savage by the way. My natural over-wordiness was not permitted its moment in the sun, which may go some way towards explaining why I felt the urge to write this!
Key points (all the good ones are stolen from the shark):
- Good spelling and grammar. Already a bug bear of mine, I dread to think how ashamed I will feel if it turns out I missed one.
- Who is the main character?
- What are they doing?
- Why are they doing it?
- Why do I (the reader) care?
- Is the writing style the sort that would keep my interest for a full book?
I am more than willing to keep working on this (although I obviously hope they'll just throw bucketloads of cash my way, no further questions) - but it's still impressive what you can do with a couple of hours of really intense focus and the right motivation!
