karen_w_newton (karen_w_newton) wrote,
karen_w_newton
karen_w_newton

Who is nobody?

I know there's a query letter project on a lot of author blogs this month, but I stumbled over a post on query letters to agents on the SFWA site. A lot of times when authors post actual query letters they used to sell books or to get their agents, their letters don't help much because they already had so many short story credits or even previous novel sales they could mention. So what do you do when you don't have any publishing credits? Lynn Flewelling's's post is called "The Complete Nobody's Guide to Query Letters." She wasn't entirely a nobody, though, in that she was a journalist. It can't hurt to have have interviewed Stephen King and Anne Rice. But what I liked was that she plunged right in and talked about what her book was about without trying to summarize the entire plot. She gives her motivation for choosing the story she wrote. She even quotes some dialog to give a feel for the main characters. All in all, it was one of the more helpful letters I have seen.






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Tags: agents, query letters
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