I've overhauled my nonfiction proposal somewhat -- mostly on my own, but I did finally, belatedly, receive comments from the nonfiction author's association, courtesy of lit agent Jennifer Chen Tran. Most of these were highlighter boxes around individual words and phrases with suggested changes, and I mostly didn't understand why the suggested ( Read more... )

I haven't been blogging very regularly in recent months. I suppose some of that is maudlin discouragement. Thinking nobody reads what I post anyway, or that my posts have no impact in the world ( Read more... )

"List some books that are similar to yours. (500 characters or less)" reads the query manager entry for both Kristin Nelson and Stephanie Rostan, two professional literary agents ( Read more... )

I've started sending out my pitch to get my second book published.

Here is my standard query letter, and below that, the parts of the formal proposal that spell out in more detail what the book is about.

Query Letter:

"When you're a fish out of water you look for the nearest ocean" - Anthony T. Hincks

THAT GUY IN OUR WOMEN'S STUDIES CLASS is a ( Read more... )

I was going to send out some query letters but Optimum Online was having an outage, so I thought I'd compose a blog post about the querying process instead.

The core piece of the process is the pitch or query letter, which is going to be the leadoff part of nearly every query that gets sent out. Authors interested in getting their books published ( Read more... )

Hi! Sorry I haven't blogged lately. Things have been simultaneously hectic and non-newsworthy for the most part in the land of STORY OF Q. That's a situation that just changed today, but I'm not quite prepared to write about today's developments (I think the relevant phrase is "waiting for the dust to settle"). Watch this space for more activity ( Read more... )

Hot damn! From one of my query letters to a nonfiction lit agent, query only, no additional materials, I just got a request for a proposal plus sample chapters ( Read more... )

In my database where I track literary agents and when I've sent them materials and when they've responded, I have a field for what materials each agent wishes to receive: just the query letter (aka pitch)? the query with a sample of the book (ranging from 3 pages to 3 full chapters)? the query with a synopsis and list of the chapters? the query ( Read more... )