Happy Friday, squiders. It is almost my birthday, which continues to be a day I look forward to, despite the inescapable march of time.
My random number generator continues to work well! I’m getting a lot done, and I’ve managed to close half of the tabs I had open (which was admittedly beginning to stress me out) as I’ve completed various tasks. But one thing is not getting done, even though I am spending time on it when it comes into rotation.
And that’s the query letter for Book 1.
This came up as the thing to do on Wednesday, so I dutifully opened my query document, read through the examples I had put in there and the notes I had written at the top from when I did a bunch of research a few weeks ago, and copied a template I’d had recommended to me to use for a first try.
And then I promptly spiraled.
You see, the first thing on the template is the housekeeping–genre, word count, comps, why you’re querying the agent, etc.
The last time I seriously queried (a decade ago?) the housekeeping went at the end. So I went onto my publishing Discord server to ask if the housekeeping was, indeed, going at the beginning these days. And they confirmed it did go at the beginning, and then we got into a side conversation about whether or not I could query as adult fantasy and not YA fantasy (a little wishy-washy, but I think we decided that it had to be YA), and then we got into a second side conversation about potential comps, during which one member very nicely talked to me in DMs about what the book is about so she could recommend some YA fantasy that might work, and during which I discovered that I am bad at explaining things succinctly and also that I don’t know how to explain it in tropes.
Which was stressful but perhaps understandable, as I have been working on the book for twenty years and it has gone through some fairly major iterations during that time. I may reread the draft again and write tropes down, because I know we are selling things that way these days.
Anyway, she made a couple of suggestions for comps that I need to look at, and I also made a post in my online group that runs the marathons to see if anyone had any comp ideas, and emailed my in-person group to ask the same.
And I realize the comps are, like, lower priority than the query itself. But my mind has fixated on them. And drawn a complete blank. I read YA fantasy (though perhaps not as much as adult fantasy) but I may need to read specifically for comparison sake for a month or so, or look at other media (like TV or movies) that has the right tone or themes.
But I also know that I can, you know, just write a kickass query. People have successful queries all the time without comps.
Now, if my brain would just catch up on that idea.
Hope your autumn is actually autumning, squiders! See you next week!
