You Know Your Query Letter Sucks When…

Reprint Saturdays… where this writer gets a break from the daily blog writing and republishes an excellent article from one of her/my colleagues…

You Know Your Query Letter Sucks When…

Here’s the rest of the sentence. You know your query letter sucks when … you don’t grab them in the first sentence. These are the words of Jeff Rivera, founder of HowToWriteAQueryLetter.com.

Jeff goes on to say:
“Agents are so busy nowadays they won’t even give a query letter an entire paragraph to grab them. If you’ve passed the first test, what I like to call the scan test (meaning it looks professional at first glance), then you’ll be lucky to go on to the next test: the first sentence.

“They might be patient enough to even give you the first few sentences but Honey, if you don’t have it together by then, you can kiss your chances of landing that agent goodbye. There are so many different ways to grab an agent.

“These are five of the techniques I use for my clients. I’ve ghost written over 100 query letters for clients successfully. 100% of them have received at least 10 top agents that have requested to read their manuscript or book proposal. In other words, use these techniques – they work. You don’t need to use all of them, just choose one.

“Here are my top five ways to grab an agent with your query letter in the very first sentence.

1. Start with a question that makes them ponder?
2. Talk about a dramatic moment in your personal life that connects with the book you’ve written
3. Tell them immediately about your platform
4. Compliment them on a specific recent sale
5. Tell them who referred you

“Use one of the five suggestions above and you’ll be one step closer to landing an agent.”

If you would like to see an example of over 60 different examples of query letters, visit: HowToWriteAQueryLetter.com.

Original post here: http://writersconferenceguidelines.com/blog/queries/you-know-your-query-letter-sucks-when/

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So there you have it!

If you’d like helping crafting your query letter, contact me and we’ll talk! I know so great experts who can help you. And I’m even able to support you too. My query letters has gotten requests for full, and I actively help dozens of writers craft their query letters.

If you’d like to talk about bees writing query letters, contact Nicole Lorenz, who wrote the bee query letter to cheer herself up.

Let me know what your querying life is like! We want to know!