This is a query? Really?

In the course of the past few weeks, we’ve been getting more than our share of really awful purported “queries”. This was probably the worst, and so I am going to use it as an example of WHAT NOT TO DO. I mean it. Don’t do it.

From: Company Name [mailto:companyname@generaldelivery.net]
Sent: Date is irrelevant
To: submit@canonbridge.com
Subject: submission query

Query Letter

Dear Editor:

My novel, xxxxxxxxxx, is a fantasy/mystery which students ages 8 through 12 will enjoy. [5 sentences then followed about the story, none of which were really “hooks” of any kind.]

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx is a story I have told to children over my several decades as a storyteller and [profession I chose to eliminate for the sake of anonymity]. For some reason unknown to me, they liked it.

[Unsigned, no address, nothing.]

**I replied as follows:

From: Maggie Stewart-Grant [myaddress@canonbridge.com
Sent: Date is irrelevant
To: Company Name [mailto:companyname@generaldelivery.net]
Subject: RE: submission query

Dear [Company Name],

Thank you for your query. What is the length of the book? Could you give us a little more information about you? If you need some assistance with details that might be missing from this query, here’s a site to help. There are loads of others, too.

http://www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/844651-How-to-Write-a-Query-Letter

I’m sure the story is interesting. Please resubmit your query with a little more information.

**Within one day, an email came with attachments. We did not ask for attachments, and so the following email was sent in return:

From: Maggie Stewart-Grant [myaddress@canonbridge.com
Sent: Date is irrelevant
To: Company Name [mailto:companyname@generaldelivery.net]
Subject: RE: submission query

Dear [Company Name],

It is our policy, when attachments are not requested from an unknown party, to delete the email. Your mail with attachments was, therefore, deleted. Our reply to your original mail did not request attachments. When we ask for attached materials, we give specific details as to what we want.

When we replied to your original email, we asked for more information. We sent a link that explained how to write a query letter. The response should have come in an appropriate query within an email. This is why we sent the link. If this one was confusing, there are several others, if you do a search on the Internet for “How to write a query letter”.

If this is difficult to manage, we suggest that you seek other avenues.

Best of luck.

A couple of things were wrong with the sender’s original email. One is obvious, in that this was not an appropriate query letter. The other is that whoever this is did not spend time reading the guidelines on our website.

1. The person to whom queries should be sent is named in our guidelines – a human, not “dear editor”.
2. The guidelines specifically state that queries with attachments will be deleted.
3. It says right in the guidelines that we will identify the documents we want in attachments, when we ask for attachments.
4. A separate paragraph tells people to learn how to write an appropriate query letter before they send one.

I am always amazed by how people, especially professionals, have made it this far in life without reading, comprehending and following instructions.

It’s not rocket science. Really.

In the midst of chaos

It has been a crazy few months.  I swore I would write on a regular basis, but – as I mentioned in the last post – you must wear the rubber boots of reality or the industry will fry you.  It’s true with small publishers and editors just as much as it’s true with writers. 

We’ve grown substantially in the past few months, both in the number of authors whose works we have acquired (or “purchased”, depending on your viewpoint), and in the amount of publicity our company has received.  Some of it has been amusing, and I’ll write about that another time, but let’s just say that we’re just too busy to worry about what others think of us at the moment.  A word of caution to those with preconceived notions, however:  Never assume. 

Needless to say, we’re a little fried.  Still, in the midst of chaos, the new routine is taking shape.  It seems hard work and dedication does matter.

As we are going through myriad changes, our web skills have been put to the test!  New ideas seem to appear on the horizon all the time, and some of them are quite good.  Two that we’re in the process of initiating now are to create text hover-overs for our titles and authors, and build a connection with BookBuzzr, a platform for creating samples of books. 

I have heard many times that BookBuzzr is a good tool, and many thanks go to its developer, Vikram Narayan.  The construct of this tool is amazing.  Not only do sample pages of your books appear on their fReado.com site, a widget is available for the publisher and the author to put on their websites.  The user isn’t limited by a certain capacity for pages, such as Amazon’s “Look Inside”, or even Google’s Books samples.  The author and/or the publisher determine the number of pages.  BookBuzzr suggests the first 50 pages.  For some of our books, this would be almost the entire book, so we’re going to make other determinations for some, but the capacity is essentially limitless.  One could put their entire book into it and offer it free of charge without the need for a special reader or a particular Kindle or ePub platform. 

For us, this is brilliant.  We even added a page to our site for samples of our books, and as soon as we are done creating them, we’ll pass the widget information on to our authors who can then use them on their own pages or on their social media sites.

More information on Book Buzzr can be found on one of Tony Eldridge’s blogs from last year.  BookBuzzr:  How to Market Your Book on Facebook, MySpace and Other Social Networks.  Tony is great, by the way.  Writers can learn a great deal from him. 

See you soon.