Thoughts on…querying

I was told querying my project to agents would be one of the hardest battles I would face as a writer, hence why they refer to it as ‘being in the trenches’. And while it has been a…harrowing experience, I’ve also been extremely lucky.

What I learned early on in my military career was to leave nothing up to chance, but that simply isn’t possible. We cannot control all things all of the time. The most we can do is give ourselves the BEST possible chance, just in case fortune chooses to favor us, even for a moment.

I labored over my query, finding so many different examples of what to do, what not to do, and a hundred different samples or templates made it hard to figure out what ACTUALLY worked with agents. So, I broke down the different sections of the query letter and wrote it as if the person I was sending it to had ADHD, like me.

What does this mean?

With ADHD, you need to spark the interest or imagination right from the start, or you will lose them. I don’t open with the metadata, I open with the story, the blurb…setting first (location or timeframe).

Then it’s the TITLE, the workcount, the genre, and comparable titles.