Questions about Query Letters … from Twitter

When it’s time to submit your book to an editor or agent, the best place to start is with a query letter. A query letter is what you send out to gauge interest in a specific book idea. And in this episode, Chris, Gena, and Rene answer questions about Query letters from Twitter including:

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• What should you put in a query letter?
• Should you query only one genre at a time?

Links:

• Writing Moments – Write with us and give your writing momentum!
• twitter.com/writingmomentum

Episode 28 transcription:

[00:00:14].210] - Chris
Welcome to the Writing Momentum podcast. I'm Christopher Maselli. I'm here with my wife, Gena, and also Rene Gutteridge. How are you doing today, Rene and Gena?

[00:00:25].490] - Gena
We're doing good. I'm waving at camera, even though I realized that we're also doing this on podcast. So, yes.

[00:00:34].610] - Chris
There we go. You got Gena beside me now. There we go. Well, today we're going to do something kind of cool for this podcast because we regularly get questions from people who say, hey, I want to know about this or that with writing or publishing or branding or what's the last one?

[00:00:57].760] - Gena
Selling and marketing.

[00:00:58].650] - Chris
Selling and marketing your book. And so what we did is we went out today on Twitter, and we found some Twitter questions that people have asked, and these questions are not things we've talked about yet. We just thought, we're going to come out straight and ask them and just see what everyone's raw answer is to these writing Q and A's that are on Twitter. How does that sound? Scary.

[00:01:23].010] - Gena
A little scary.

[00:01:26].330] - Rene
You got to always be able to say, I don't know. That's a very healthy character trait.

[00:01:33].350] - Chris
That's true. I don't know is okay to say.

[00:01:36].130] - Rene
Absolutely.

[00:01:37].550] - Chris
Here we go. The first question is from Anna Maywright she says" Hi. For those who write in multiple genres, do you recommend only querying one genre at a time?" So she's talking about, like, if she wants to send a query about a book into an agent or to an editor, should she just query one genre? I guess one book at a time. What do you all think? Don't ever jump in at once.

[00:02:11].730] - Rene
Well, of course. Well, I should say of course, as if everybody knows my writing history. Okay, let me start over. I write multiple genre and fiction, so I've written probably five different genres in my 20 year writing career. It's tricky. So I would say you need a plan. You certainly don't want to be sending multiple genres to one publisher, and you don't necessarily want to scare your agent into because the first thing an agent will tell you is, whatever you do, don't write multiple genres. Now, that's pretty good advice generally, but if you are the kind of writer like me who needed to write in multiple genres, I wrote comedy. I write suspense. That's a conversation you want to have with your agent, and you need to stay upfront, look, I'm a multi genre writer, and let's come up with a plan. My agent and I did come up with the plan to do that, and it was tricky. I always describe it like I was dating multiple people at the same time and trying to keep everybody happy. That's the conversation for another time and how we did that. But it is tricky. It splits your readership.

[00:03:41].950] - Rene
So understanding that and being able to talk intelligently about that with the people that you're going to go into business with is a good idea.

[00:03:52].490] - Chris
Yeah, I think if you're querying an agent or an editor first, I would try to figure out what kinds of things they represent. And if they don't represent both the genres that you're querying with, I would just query with the one. Right. Not with both, because why waste your time on something that they might not even be interested in representing or publishing? That said, I think that if you're sitting at a writer's conference, I might be more apt to pitch more than one thing, kind of gauging the feedback you're getting one on one. But definitely if you're doing it through email or something like that, I'd be more apt to focus in on one, I think.

[00:04:37].160] - Gena
Let me ask you, I'm going to follow up with a follow up question with this. What about the independent author who is publishing directly themselves? They're publishing. What is your feeling about an author publishing in multiple genres? And I asked this because I know multiple authors who do this and who write for multiple genres, and some of them use pen names. Some of them will change up their name, their author's name, depending on the genre.

[00:05:16].670] - Chris
If I wanted to write romance books, I mean, I do so under my name, I might do Christopher no. You know what I would do? I would do Ellie Christmas instead of Christmas. That sounds like a great pen name for a romance novel, doesn't it?

[00:05:36].050] - Rene
It's not bad.

[00:05:39].810] - Gena
So what do you guys think about that?

[00:05:42].450] - Rene
Well, I have less, like, I guess, experience in the independent publishing world. So I would say, of course, that changing your pen name, changing your name, that changes the game if nobody knows you're the same author. The trick to that is you're going to have to be producing twice the number of books per year.

[00:06:04].920] - Gena
Right.

[00:06:05].270] - Rene
So that's the hard thing. That was the hard thing for me when I was doing multiple genres and traditional publishing is your other publisher isn't going to be like, oh, you have another book deadline. Well, let us step back and give you some room. They don't care what you're doing at your other publisher. And so you've got to be able to produce at least two books a year, sometimes more than that. So in independent publishing, I would say that the idea is that no matter what your pen name is, if audiences are following you, then they need to be able to keep you got to keep them entertained consistently.

[00:06:47].250] - Chris
Yeah, I agree. Well, that's good. Are you ready for the next question? I almost put it there on the screen, and it somehow messed our screen up. So for those of you who are watching on YouTube, you see all the crazy things that are happening here on the screen, those who are listening, you don't know what we're talking about. All right. This is also about queries. So we're going to follow up with another question about queries. This is from Cod Noek. He says, outside of an engaging premise and strong writing, what do you hope to find in queries? He's asking an agent this, "what do you hope to find in queries outside of an engaging premise and strong writing?" I'm going to jump right in here and say, I don't know that you're going to actually usually see a whole lot of strong writing in the query unless you submit some sample pages from the book. You want it to be written well, of course, but I don't know if you think a lot of agents in editors actually look at the query and say, that was written so well, they.

[00:07:47].050] - Rene
Just want to make sure it's not written terribly. That was amazing writing, but if you're not writing strongly, they'll notice. Yeah, that would be a hard thing.

[00:07:59].970] - Chris
I do want to jump in and say this. This is one of those things that when you're writing your manuscript, when you're writing a query, anything like that, you want to make sure that something as simple as formatting doesn't turn off the agent or the editor, because really, you can jump to the top 10% of the pack just by having a really well written formatted query.

[00:08:24].690] - Gena
That's what I was going to say about query, is that we always say that you need to know the rules before you break them. And there are rules about querying writing a query letter as well. So make sure that you are following those rules, because when they're getting so many pitches sent to them, so many query letters, query emails, that kind of thing, when they're getting so many of them, they will start looking for any reason to toss it. They're not going to invest time in something that isn't written well, that isn't formatted well, that isn't following the query rules. That is querying an agent or an editor about a genre that they don't even carry and that they're not interested in, that they haven't asked for those kinds of things. So they're going to be and it's not because anybody's trying to be cruel, it's just a matter of time. They're flipping through these things, they're going through them and they're scanning them. And so anything that stands out as a reason not to look at it any further is going to be the thing that gets your query letter pitched or your query email pitched.

[00:09:38].430] - Gena
So follow the rules, make sure it's strong. And then the other thing is, I think they're looking for how much of an investment can you bring? What can you bring to the table? What kind of marketing can you bring to the table? Even if it's whether it's and I know in a query, you don't have a lot of room for that. But they're going to want to know that they're working with somebody who's serious about this and who's serious about making their book a success.

[00:10:09].370] - Rene
And I would say add on to that and totally agree with what's been said. I would add don't be a jerk. And you can't imagine the number of jerky type queries agents and editors get like, you're an idiot if you pass this up, or even complete lies. I've had multi million dollar offers on this, but I feel like this is supposed to go to you. They're just so absurd. You can find them online. They're kind of hilarious, but in a minor way. Don't be a jerk either. Don't be cocky. Be professional. And also, to add on to what Gena said, they want to know you're not a one hit wonder. No agent is interested in the one great book that you have. You've got to showcase that. You've got a great premise, you've got other great premises. You've been working a long time on this. You want to be a career writer, and you're interested in finding an agent to partner with you on that because it's a lot of work to launch a new writer. It's a lot of work. And so they want the payoff to be that in 20 years, you're still writing for them and writing with them.

[00:11:31].660] - Chris
You know, they want to know you're professional. Right?

[00:11:36].070] - Rene
Right. You're going to be the person that hits the deadlines. You're going to be the person that knows how to act around an editor in a publishing house, etc, or etc. That you're not going to be the person that posts like, super weird stuff on Facebook. Those are the things they're looking for. I promise you. Those are the things that they're looking for as well. So anything that you can do in your query letter to make sure you don't come across as somebody that's a high risk person, even better.

[00:12:06].130] - Chris
That's good. All right, so these are just two of the questions we've had. Now we actually are setting up a time where we're going to be answering questions and answers live on the spot, just like we're doing here on the podcast today. It's going to be on July 28, and so be sure to check out go to writingmomentum.com, and then we'll have all the details about that. We're going to be streaming on Facebook and YouTube live for that. If you can join us, whether you can join us or not, please send us your question. You can just, again, go to writingmomentum.com. We got a chat box on there. You can send us your question there, and we'll be happy to add that to the list of questions that we're going to answer live. And we'll be recording that too, so that you can enjoy that anytime. That's coming up at the end of this month. We're actually planning to do this on a monthly basis having a live Q and A. So if you're listening to this sometime in the future after this one has already been live, just know there's another one likely coming up soon.

[00:13:03].280] - Chris
So be sure to still send us your questions and send that in. So meanwhile, this has been actually part one. We're going to do two of these. We're going to do a part two here next week. And so be sure to tune back next week and listen to that too. Thank you guys so much for joining us and having us do all this together. Be sure to rate and subscribe and what I'll do for podcast review. That's right. We appreciate you guys. You're awesome. This is Chris and Gena and Rene saying thank you for listening to writing Momentum. We'll talk to you next week. Bye bye.