Please keep in mind I did this three to four years ago.
For those of you who don’t know, Query letters are those letter (emails) that you send to traditional publishers to ask them to consider your manuscript (apparently it’s not a book until it’s published) for publication.
Easy? Ummm… no. You would think so. Especially with this thing they call Google. It’s suppose to hold all the answers. Ask it a question and it tells you the answer. Simple. Unless you don’t ask the right questions. And of course if you don’t know anything it’s hard to ask the right questions. Even “how to write a query letter” did not get me an easy answer. There were a lot of ‘paying’ lessons I could take. Or ‘sponsored by’ ads. But nothing that said in laymen’s terms what to do. So I did the best I could with what I understood.
Here was my problem. I didn’t know the lingo. In the publishing world they use English words, but they don’t mean the same thing as they do in other industries. They used words like “marketing”. With my human resource business background I thought they meant ‘how to get what you have to the people’. The four P’s Product, Place, Price, and Promotion. This is NOT what they mean. Marketing in publishing is all about the genre. So not only was I not on the same page I was in a whole different part of the library. (pun totally intended).
There were other things; Pitch/blurb/hook that I didn’t fully understand. Comp Titles… WTF? Not to mention my genre. What I thought my genre was four years ago is different than what the publisher are saying my genre is.
I wrote these query letters, to publicists that I had a twice removed association with. Four total. I didn’t try the Big guys, I knew better than that. Something you may also not know. It takes an average of eight to twelve months to hear back. That’s right A YEAR! By the time I got the forth denial back I was quite done. As another thing was… not all of them were okay if you sent in multiple manuscripts to different publishers at the same time. Which in reality meant, some of them wanted you to send them the manuscript only to them, wait a year to hear ‘no’ before you could send it to someone else.
I don’t know if I was rejected by these publishers because my manuscript was bad. Or because I didn’t write a good query letter. Or because I sent my manuscript to more than one at a time. I never got any feedback, just a ‘Thanks but no thanks.’ email.
So let’s “Harry Potter” this thing and make them sorry they didn’t sign me. Buy my book; “Through Their Eyes.” Links can be found on my website: kcindeedoll.ca
