I have created what I believe to be the greatest query letter ever. I’ve been writing it for days, tweaking this and changing that. I’ve spent a lot of time researching what turns an agent off and what can get your painstakingly invoked words ruthlessly chucked into a slush pile.
And you know, most of it is common sense.
I mean, I may be slightly off my rocker and tilted to one side, but I would like to think that because we’re writers, we would know what to write. “Don’t tell us you’ve just finished a novel—why else would you be writing us?” or “Never say your book is the next Harry Potter—this makes us think it just might be, well, the next Harry Potter and usually, we’re pretty freaking disappointed.” should be obvious things to avoid, but it seems this is not so. Disappointingly, enough of us are sending in malarkey like this to justify experts having to produce Querying for the Dumbass instructions.
But my query—my query is clever and quirky. The words run together like butter down the side of a hot mound of mashed potato and come to a cohesive finish at the bottom in a supple pool of slick and creamy amalgamation.
You have to admit that even if you don’t like mashed potatoes, you’d read a letter like that, right?
And that’s the idea. Whether or not you have creds to list, achievements to boast or stats to rattle, your letter is supposed to sell you—your wits, your worth, your words.
So prove you’re a writer and use them wisely.
Now, if only I had a novel to go along with my cracker of a query.
Hazy Shades of Me 