The ABCs of Book Writing: Q is for QUERY (letter) . . .

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. . . and when to start QUERYING.

As most authors know, the usual first approach to agents and publishers is via a query letter. It's a given that the stronger your query, the better are the chances of sparking interest in your book project. Less widely known are the optimal times for drafting and for sending your query letter, as well as the most effective content to include in it.

When to draft your query

It is never too soon to write the first draft of your query letter. Drafting your query at the beginning or early in the writing of your project will help you focus on the most original and marketable aspects of your manuscript. This is turn can lead to insights on how to best structure your book. If, as the writing proceeds, you get new ideas, you can always revise your draft query to reflect any new ideas that emerge as the writing proceeds.

If, however, you did not write a draft query early in your project, and left it to the middle or the end, this is not a serious problem. More crucial are knowing when, or when not, to query initially and how to ensure the effectiveness of the query letter's content.

When to start querying

The point at which it is reasonable to start querying, and to expect some positive results, varies according to the category of your book. Here are the basic guidelines:

Fiction

Novel. Any novel of any genre must be completed before querying. For practical purposes, in most cases a completed manuscript will not be a first draft but a well-revised later version, possibly also edited or assessed by a professional editor.

Short stories and short story collections. Unless specified otherwise, for anthologies, journals, and the like, individual stories should be completed and as polished as possible. Unless you are an established and well-known fiction author, short story collections should also be completed.

Nonfiction

Creative nonfiction. Unless you are established and well-known in your genre, memoirs, popular histories, biographies, and other creative nonfiction should be completed before querying.

True story and poetry collections. Unless you have an established reputation, collections must be completed before querying.

General commercial nonfiction and niche-market nonfiction. This category includes self-help and how-to books of various kinds, as well as assorted textbooks, manuals, and guides. When you have a publication track record in your field, or have otherwise established your expertise (through workshops, talk circuits, and webinars, for example), you may be able to secure a book contract on the strength of a detailed proposal and written samples. The minimum sample requirement is typically an introduction and first chapter. But the required minimum may vary according to publisher and genre.

If you have expertise in a field but do not have standard credentials, then it is unlikely that anyone will give you a contract based on a partial manuscript. Your best chance is to wait until you have a completed, polished manuscript that is publication ready. This minimizes risk to the potential publisher and will increase the odds that some acquiring editor just might take a chance on you.

When never to send a query

Never waste your own or others' time by sending out queries when you are an unknown writer with a great idea (you think) and little or nothing written down. In the book trade, ideas and titles cannot be copyrighted and therefore do not hold commercial value or interest for agents and publishers. The value rests in the tangible expression of the idea: book, collection, story, essay, or poem.

Length and content of an effective query letter

Queries may vary by author, genre, and particular manuscript, but in all cases, a basic effective query letter should be no longer than two single-spaced pages; one page is best. Your query letter should include the following content:

Opening “hook.” This is a paragraph of one to three sentences that introduces the book as concisely and compellingly as possible. In some instances, framing this introduction as an open-ended question, or question and answer, may work well. Some agents like the formula of "blank meets blank in . . ." Example: The Walking Dead meets The Hunger Games in this post-apocalyptic dystopian thriller.

Short description of the book, a.k.a synopsis. The synopsis embedded in a query should be brief: 100 to 250 words that clearly convey the overall subject/theme/story line/characters/problem/resolution/purpose of the book.

Marketing information. Summarize any or all of the following, as relevant to your particular book: the most important statistics/facts/information about the book’s topicality; its main targeted readership; its secondary readership, if any; the current works that it compares to or would be in competition with; how it differs from the competition or will fill a gap in the market; whether the book is part of a series or will have a sequel; what your next book will be about and how it will relate to this one.

Brief author bio. Focus on prior publications, if any, and what qualifications—education and/or professional credentials and/or research interests and/or life experience—make you particularly suited to write this book.

Summarizing paragraph. This is an optional paragraph to include any crucial information you have not managed to convey in preceding paragraphs: for example, availability of complete manuscript and/or sample chapters and/or full proposal; genre or subgenre; and total actual or projected word count of the completed manuscript.

A few final tips

Do make it clear that your manuscript is completed. This can be a selling point even if you have the kind of nonfiction project that does not necessarily require completion. A bird in the hand . . . is how agents and publishers think.

Don't ever assume that almost meeting completion or other requirements (such as word count) is good enough because agents and publishers will make an exception for you. They won't.

Do articulate what is different about your manuscript; specify how it offers something beyond the current competition in your genre.

Don't say your manuscript is unique: this raises the skeptical hackles of agents, acquiring editors, publishers, and their marketing personnel. Remember the prior blog post N is for NEW . . . and its message that little if anything is entirely new or unique.

Do use email or snail mail according to the stated preferences of agents and publishers. Consult the submissions pages of their websites and, to the letter, follow the guidelines given.

Don't, unless specifically invited to do so, query agents, publishers, or their acquiring editors by telephone.

You're a writer, so write.

Up next . . . "R is for REVISING"

The ABCs of Book Writing: J is for JUST write . . .

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. . . and JUST why you should.

In the real world of professional authorship, the bottom line is: writers write. Over the course of a career some authors will produce dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of books, articles, and reviews. Others may produce only a handful and build a career by combining writing with speaking, teaching, or consulting. How prolific you are depends on a number of personal and professional factors—for example: whether or not you have a day job, your health and energy, your family and domestic obligations, and the type of writing you do. Regardless of your individual situation, what you don't want to be is a one-book author.

Why writers must keep writing

There are four basic reasons why there is no downside to your being as prolific a writer as you can manage to be:

1. Writers must keep writing for the obvious reason that this is the only way to produce a sufficient amount of work to reach others. The more you produce, the more likely you are to find markets and draw readers.

2. Writing continuously is the only way to significantly grow as a writer. In the course of producing one book, you may gather momentum and hone some skills. But without continuing to write, it is hard to imagine maintaining your craft, let alone improving on it.

3. The more you write, the more likely you are to be successfully published. It is difficult to break into the market as a first-time book author with absolutely no credentials. Agents, publishers, and readers will be swayed in your favor if you have some writing credentials, such as book reviews, journal or magazine articles, or anthology contributions. Now that publishing credentials can be obtained through both print and digital sources, it's hard to justify wanting to be a book author while remaining totally unpublished.

4. To keep on writing is to be a professional. Even if you have just finished a magnum opus, you have no excuse to hang up the quill pen or power down your computer. If you work hard at your manuscript and persevere with querying agents and publishers, or with marketing your self-published book, your work will eventually attract someone who can take you to the next level. But odds are, that someone will not only value prior writing credentials but will also want you at least to have a second book in progress.

Strategies to keep you writing

Ideally, while you are working on one book—presumably your main project—you should be writing something else as while. If this is absolutely not possible for you, then once the main project is completed, immediately begin the next book or some other writing project, preferably one related to your newly completed book.

Strategies that will keep you writing can be as many and as varied as writers themselves. Here are a few for you to try and to adapt to suit yourself and your situation:

—While writing one book, research, plan, make notes on, and write snippets of the next book.

—Seek out book reviewing opportunities. Start but don't stop with Amazon, Smashwords, and Goodreads.

—While writing one book, work on another in a different but related genre, to keep you fresh in both. Examples of possible pairings: science fiction/popular science; contemporary romance/romantic suspense; detective fiction/true crime; popular history/historical fiction; cozy mystery/period mystery.

—Write articles or short stories related to your current book in progress; write and send out queries for these.

—Start, and work hard at, a blog related to your book.

—Look for related blogs to contribute to as a guest.

—If your book is part of a series, make notes on, or write drafts of, later books in the series.

—Just for fun, write fan fiction. It could grow your author platform.

—If all else fails, write journal or diary entries. These will not likely be publication ready anytime soon, but maybe someday . . .

Just keep writing

However you choose to do it, stay continuously involved in the writing process. Some of us must devote time and energy to day jobs, and we all need downtime. But succeeding as a book author means never entirely walking away from writing, whether it's a book you're working on or something—anything—else that qualifies as potentially publishable written work.

Writers write.

Coming next week . . . "K is for KNOWING what you don't know"

The ABCs of Book Writing: D is for DISCIPLINE . . .

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. . . and DEVELOPING it now.

"Apply seat of pants to seat of chair." Today, the old tried and true formula for disciplined writing might be extended to include: "Park feet in front of standing desk"; or: "Tap finger on touch screen"; or: "Direct voice to speech-recognition software." The trouble is that all such admonitions are more easily uttered than acted upon.

However you choose to write, finding the time and discipline to do so is a challenge. Life—in particular, the day job—tends to get in the way of your best-laid plans to establish a writing regimen. Apart from the imperative to work and pay bills, buy groceries, and keep a roof over your head, even writers need to spend time with friends and family, get some exercise and fresh air, sleep a few hours, and just chill out.

So when do you write? 

Choosing a time of day to write

Your choice of a time, or times, to write will depend on a number of variables: for example, whether you are a morning person or a night owl, the quiet or chaos in your household, and the demands of your employment. Most writers that I know either get up early and write before going to work, or they write in the evening after dinner. A few energetic types manage to write both early and late in the day. Those whose "day jobs" are at night, or who work changing shifts, have to create their own versions of the before-work and/or before-bed writing sessions. Some particularly motivated multitaskers may also manage to get in some extra writing time during lulls in the workplace, coffee breaks, and lunch hours.

The writing session 

How long should each writing session be?

For significant progress, plan for sessions of at least an hour each; more ideally, two to three hours.  On a good day, you can produce a reasonable quota in an hour. On other occasions, the words do not come so readily and you will need two or three hours to grind out what might not even amount to a minimum daily quota. Don't worry unduly about the less productive sessions. Over time, the good and not-so-good days average out, and the slow sessions, while frustrating, are nonetheless part of an overall forward progression.

How often should you write?

Obviously, the more days per week that you can manage to write, the better. But if you're working at your employment twenty to forty or more hours a week, you are unlikely to be able to write daily or even every other day. The good news is that you don't have to write that often. In fact, to produce a book-length manuscript in reasonable time, you really only have to write one to three hours three times a week, or some equivalent of that. Here's why:

Word count: The mathematics of writing a book

All you need to write at each session is a comparatively modest 550 words—approximately two double-spaced pages. On a good day, you will do this in an hour or less. On those other days, you might well need a two- to three-hour session. Either way, if you produce just 550 words three times a week, that's a weekly total of 1650 words. Multiply that by the 52 weeks in a year—and there you have it: a finished draft of 85,800 words. This is an acceptable length for all but a few specialty subgenres (some of which may even require fewer words)—and you can congratulate yourself on having written a book in a year.

Typically, as writing progresses, momentum grows, and you could increasingly surpass your session quota. If so, then you would in fact produce an entire book manuscript in a matter of months. When you get the hang of it, disciplined writing doesn't require as much discipline as you once might have thought!

Coming next week . . . "E is for EMAIL"

Why Join the Writers' Union of Canada (TWUC)?

The many answers to the above question have been tweeted @twuc and can also be found on Facebook at TWUC #WhyIJoin. Here's my contribution to TWUC's #WhyIJoin initiative...

From the first article I ever published, to later books, I always wanted as much professional information about writing and publishing as I could get. In the early days of my career, this was a challenge. But now, TWUC keeps me informed on the latest issues and trends that are crucial to professional book authors. So here, in a word--and a video--is #WhyIJoin: PROFESSIONALISM

Subject to a peer review of the commercial viability of their books, self-published authors can now join TWUC.