You have about the same odds of getting published as getting struck by lightning…
…so let’s get those numbers up and go over six things to do to get a literary agent!
Category: Query Letter
My book Metl: The ANGEL Weapon is coming out next week, on March 5th!
To celebrate, each stream leading up to the release will be about my process writing and/or publishing the book.
So let’s get started with one of the most important steps along the journey: how I got a literary agent.
National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) has ended, and there are a lot of people out there with finished first drafts of books.
First off, congratulations! Writing is a long, arduous process, and finishing the first draft is an important first step. But now you might be wondering, what do I do next?
Well, I have some unconventional advice that you might like!
Last stream we continued our Rubbish to Published series, where we start from absolutely nothing and create something “publishable.”
We did our worldbuilding in the previous stream, so this time we took the next step: writing our query letter.
A query letter is the letter you write to literary agents, telling them about your book and yourself. Typically you write it only once you’ve finished editing and polishing your book, but I like to do it earlier. If your goal is publication, then it’s good to have your eye on the prize from the very beginning.
I talk about this more in detail in my Tips-y Tuesday post. Here’s what we came up with for our query letter:
Last week on Tips-y Tuesday we talked about how to stay on track and write every day. This week I’d like to talk about a strategy for writing novels that I’ve recently employed: writing the query letter first.
For those unaware, the query letter is the short letter you write to prospective literary agents once you’ve finished your manuscript. It consists of a short greeting, a back-of-the-book summary of your novel, any writing credentials you have, and that’s about it.
Now that may not sound so bad, but writing the query letter can be one of the most frustrating and stressful parts of writing a novel. I used to tell my writing group that writing the manuscript is the easy part, afterwards comes the hard part.