Preview - Premium Post - Query Letter Workshop #1
Query Review for a Young Adult Contemporary Fantasy
Hello there! I’m here with a preview of an upcoming Query Letter Workshop #1 coming to you later today, here on The Breakdown.
The Premium Post will be published in a few hours!
Well, I thought I’d have the next Writer’s Workshop: First Five Pages ready for you today. But between work, and quite honestly, the dumpster fire that is the U.S. election and the state of our democracy, I’m wrecked and found that I needed a little more time to get that review wrapped up. Plus, it’s not easy finding the perfect video clips as an enhancement to these reviews! 😁
So, in the place of that, I thought I’d share with you the first official Query Review I’ve done in a long time. I’ve done unofficial ones for friends over the past few years, but since I’ll be doing more of these, professionally, I felt it was a good opportunity to break down one of these reviews in case you have questions and so that we all have a chance to learn.
This is the case of an unpublished, but somewhat seasoned writer, who’d been honing her craft writing on the serialized fiction website, Wattpad, but has also had some success with a traditional publisher in a special-case scenario (we’ll get more into that later.)
In any event, this is her first time querying, and she’d asked for some input on her latest query draft. My goal was to help ensure that the query presented both her and her work in the strongest light possible, and to accentuate what made her and her work worth noting, vis-à-vis the marketplace.
So, what we’ll do in this breakdown is look at her original query, my recommendations, and then the revised query she—with a bit more of my help—came up with in the end.
Note - Since the writer is still in the midst of querying, this preview will only contain a summary of the recommendations. I’ll be publishing the full review, with her permission and her identifying information redacted, only for Premium subscribers.
But before we get to the good stuff, I was so pleased with how this query review went, I just have to humble-brag for a second. Here’s what the writer wrote to me after we were through with the review:
Paula,
I just went through your suggestions tonight—all of which were so helpful—and it was great! THANK YOU SO, SO MUCH for all your help! Your feedback was concise and actionable, and I loved your thoughts on how to address this character-driven novel and include the high-stakes subplots too. I feel so much more comfortable and confident with my query!
It just warms my heart to be able to help other writers!
So, what is it that I did in this query review? Here’s a high-level overview of my key suggestions.
First, I reminded her of the state of the market. Agents, almost across the board, want to diversify their list of writers and the kinds of stories they tell. They’re actively seeking BIPOC and LBGTQ+ stories, BIPOC and LBGTQ+ writers, and issue-driven and socially relevant works. In this case, this particular writer and her work didn’t fit into any of those categories. However, there is also an overall leaning of the marketplace into lighter, more entertaining works that offer a sense of escapism to our very troubled times. So, I wanted her to be cognizant of both those current market conditions, so she could adjust her expectations, her submissions strategy, and also give agents and the market more time to circle back towards the kinds of stories she tells.
Next, and largely due to the above, I suggested that she lead with her USP (Unique Selling Proposition). In this case, it was that she’d had a previous story picked up by Hachette Audio and Wattpad and turned into an audio book. She had put that as the last paragraph in her original query.
I then had her add the basics to that opening paragraph: genre, word count, and comps. This is all critical information an agent needs to know, up front, before they invest any time in assessing your story. If none of these elements work for an agent, then it’s highly unlikely—even if they like your premise or plot—that they would request a submission to evaluate. They’re not reading queries just to find stories or writers they like and enjoy. They need to feel strongly that they can sell your work, and if it’s not where it needs to be, how much time and effort they can afford to invest in order to get it to where it needs to be.
One of the biggest issues I noticed in the original query was a lack of clarity in the storytelling (meaning — who did precisely what because of this or else that would happen.) So, in essence, the query was missing a unique protagonist with a clear goal, a clear motivation, taking clear action and reacting to a defined inciting incident, in order to avoid the high stakes consequences that would happen if the challenge facing them had not been met and overcome.
In this case, I went back to her story summary and discovered there was a family legacy hanging over the protagonist’s head, as well as a bitter rival chomping at the bit for the position the protagonist so desperately wanted. So, boom! There we have both an internal goal and an external goal we can include in the query, instead of the low stakes ones that were in the original draft.
Speaking of low stakes, there was a lot of language that I suggested the writer tweak because it kept communicating low stakes throughout the query.
So, those were the major points I focused on in my review—plus, a few additional tweaks here and there. In the Premium Post, we’ll take a look at the original query, the recommendations in detail, and then the revised query we came up with in the end.
If you’re a Premium Supporter, you can access the full query breakdown here.
If you're interested in working with me for query, submission, or editing work, please feel free to reply to this email if you’re receiving it via my newsletter or contact me at paulagwriter@gmail.com. You can even hit me up on Twitter at @paulapdx_writer.
Please note, that I can’t provide this assistance for free (outside of what I do here in the newsletter), but newsletter subscribers are entitled to a generous discount. Contact me for more details!
Until next time!
~ Paula
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