Time for my second Friendsgiving query critique! When I saw this Viking-inspired middle grade query in the inbox, I nabbed it right away. Check it out:

As with my previous critique, this is already a relatively good letter. It’s clear you did your research on what to include. As it stands right now, it feels a little stretched to me, like you have too much of the story included with not enough details about each event. In fact, I think you could end the pitch after your third paragraph, beef up the details provided, and have an even stronger query. Here are some thoughts:


Dear (Agent),
Thirteen-year-old Pippa is an impulsive Viking girl who spends tedious days caring for her beloved, sick aunt.
While there’s nothing inherently wrong with this opening line, it doesn’t hook me. Try to rework it into what she wants. “Thirteen-year-old Pippa longs to journey into the treacherous Scottish Hebrides to find her long-lost father. Instead, she is forced to stay home and care for her beloved, sick aunt.”
She longs to be reunited with her father, who was whisked away by a malevolent cloud when she was six.
The whuhh…? We need a little more information about this cloud up front. Does she know what the cloud is or what evil force is behind it? Is there folklore in her village that explains it? I’d spend a few more words on setting up what this cloud is and why it’s so dangerous.
 All she remembers of him is that his beard smells like pine.   
Meh, you can probably take this line out and put more emphasis on the rogue cloud.


Pippa and her older brother are stunned when their father sends them a warning to hide.
Again, we need a little more information here. She hasn’t been able to find him for years, but he can send a message to them? Is he magic? Beef this up a little. “Pippa and her older brother (you can name the brother here, if he’s a main character) are one day stunned to hear their father’s voice coming out of his old sparkly Barbiemobile, which they thought had fallen silent forever. It gave them a warning—tell the village to hide up in the Cave of the Wandering Dingbats, or else fall prey to the evil cloud. Despite their efforts… (etc)”
Despite their efforts, the cloud returns—and this time it takes Pippa’s brother.


The magic-wielding Bards on her island want Pippa to stay put--but she’s done with hiding. 
This is good—it tells us what forces are working against Pippa.
Pippa might be the cloud’s next victim. She fears for her brother, but Pippa’s no coward. Gutsy, armed with her father’s dagger, and determined to defeat the mysterious cloud—she vows to find her family.
Like I said, I’d end the pitch here with a more solidified idea of the stakes. Because we don’t know much about the cloud beyond that it takes people, it’s hard to say exactly what risk Pippa’s taking. Family bonds are a good universal concept that everyone can relate to, but I think you can punch it up a little more. If the cloud isn’t stopped, will it just keep taking people from her village? Will it spread, or grow stronger? Leave us with a sense that the problem has stakes beyond just her family (even though that’s important).

Pippa’s unlikely group of friends secretly commandeer a Viking longship. They brave ruffians and fickle oceans in the Scottish Hebrides while uncovering clues to find her missing brother. 
Desperate, Pippa trades away her voice for a spell to defeat the sinister cloud. She’s elated when her brother is nearly saved, until a close friend betrays her. Pippa realizes she may have traded her voice for nothing—and lost her brother in the process. 
​
LIKE A RICH JEWEL is a middle grade fantasy novel steeped in ninth century Norse and Celtic folklore. It is complete at 71,000 words. The novel can stand alone but has series potential. 
Excellent. This is where you would put comp titles, if you have them. “Readers of (A Book, by An Author) will enjoy the Vikings and clouds and Barbiemobiles.”
Most queries will have a brief bio of the author at this point. Even if you don’t have writing credentials, it’s a good idea to give the agent a little idea of who you are. “I am a Barbiemobile assembly manager and lead bodhran player in my Celtic rock group, the Scurvy Thistlepunchers.”

​Thank you for your time and consideration.
Best Regards,
(Author)
(Author’s contact info)
 
Good letter. Cut it down and punch up the rest to really make it stand out. Thanks for sharing, and good luck querying!

Don't forget to join us on Twitter this coming Friday (December 2) at 4 PM and 8 PM for a chat about writing, querying, and publishing! Bring yer tough questions and keep an eye on #FFChat.

For the other Friendsgiving Feedback critiques, see:
Michelle Hauck, author of GRUDGING and FAITHFUL
Laura Heffernan, author of AMERICA'S NEXT REALITY STAR
Liana Brooks, author of HEROES AND VILLAINS series
Sarah Remy, author of THE BONE CAVE

The "how I got my agent" post is a traditional rite-of-passage for any aspiring author, so here we go.  When I first heard from my agent, I was a ranger at Yellowstone for the summer, focusing mainly on telling people when Old Faithful was going to erupt and trying not to be murdered by the most murder-y park in the NPS [citation needed].  That was in 2015. Woodwalker came out in the spring of 2016, and its companion will be out in early 2017. But signing with an agent was my first huge step forward.  The first, and potentially most significant.

The story about how I got my agent is, perhaps, no more intriguing than anybody else’s, except there were probably more bison involved than most.  ​Here’s more or less how it went, written inexplicably in second-person.
​

1. You write the thing.  This is a step that many people never make it past.  Writing a book is hard.  It’s great when it’s all a perfect story arc laid out in your head, but once you start putting it on paper, you realize that your characters aren’t who you thought they were and refuse to do what you thought they’d do.  They create side plots and auxiliary drama like they’re working at daggum summer camp.  But you struggle through it, and you end up with the ugliest, nastiest piece of writing ever known to humankind.
2. You edit.  Edit and polish and revise and discard, until you have something halfway passable. 
3. Now you send that tottering, drooling fledgling novel out to your dearest friends who won’t abandon you even if you’ve written the worst book ever penned.  They take two months to get back to you. 
4. You sit rocking in the fetal position and desperately try to think of something else.
5. They reply!  They have suggestions and edits.  They are generally optimistic, but you’re not sure if that’s because what you’ve written is actually good, or if they’re just being nice.
6. Repeat steps 2, 3, and 4.  During this time, you also research agents and read eleven thousand blogs on writing a query letter.
7. Finally, you decide your story is ready.  Maybe not fully mature, but at least past that gawky, pimply stage, enough to pass as a legitimate story.  Getting to this stage alone took me about eight months.
8. Now you take that Pinterest board full of potential agents and narrow it down to a handful.  You write your query letter.  This is much, much harder than it seems, because you must somehow hook an agent with only 300 words, introducing your story, characters, and stakes without giving away your ending.  This alone can take weeks of revision and editing. 
9. You query agents.  This is an intensely long and emotionally taxing process.  Many people outside the literary world don’t realize most authors need to find an agent to be published with a traditional publishing house (as opposed to self-publishing).  Publishers, especially big, reputable ones, rarely take unsolicited manuscripts.  An agent is sort of the publisher’s front-line defense.  They sift through thousands of queried manuscripts, pulling out the tiny percentage that resonate with them (and they think they can sell).
   But every agent is different, and every agency has different submission guidelines.  Some want your query letter and first ten pages.  Some want no pages at all.  Some want a synopsis.  Some want the first five chapters.  Some say they’ll respond within two weeks, others in eight, others never.  So you have to tailor everything exactly right, making sure you don’t make the grave mistake of misspelling an agent’s name in your salutation. 
10. You email out your queries.  See step 4.
11. You get your first rejection!  It burns.  You weep, continue with step 4.
12. You continue to get rejections!  They’re not as bad as the first, but they still hurt.
13. You hear back from about half the agents you queried, and they’re all rejections.  You wait out the remaining waiting period with no word from the others.
14. You wipe your nose.  You pick yourself up.  Maybe one or two agents took pity and gave you a little bit of feedback.  You follow their advice and the additional insights you’ve gained over the last eight weeks of heartbreak.  You revise some more until your manuscript is better than it was.
15. You query again.  Repeat steps 10-15 for an indeterminate amount of time.  Perhaps it will be all eternity, perhaps it will just be one more round.  Some people get hundreds of rejections before they find the right agent (or before their manuscript is ready for publishing). 
    I was one of the lucky ones.  Halfway through my second round of queries, I had two agents request my manuscript.  Now, this is still a preliminary stage.  They could very well get part way into your novel and decide it’s not for them.  In fact, that’s exactly what happened with one agent.  But then…
16. You get THE EMAIL.  The email from the agent saying she loved your work.  That she wants to talk about representing you. 
17. You run around screaming like a madwoman (probably at work, since it’s during working hours).  You text/call all your friends and family.  You maybe do something slightly illegal in your giddy state, like doing a victory dance on the cone of Old Faithful (okay, I didn't do this. Don't do this. This is very illegal.).
18. You calm yourself down, remind yourself that nobody’s said yes yet, that you still have to talk on the phone.  You politely email back saying you’re thrilled she’s interested in your work.  You set up a time to talk.
19. There’s a goddAMN BISON JAM when you try to bike home from work, leading you, in full ranger uniform, to stand shouting at this stupid tankbeast to get its idiot bulk off the crosswalk so you can get home to your family!!!!! 
20. All the Europeans take pictures of the park ranger losing her mind in front of said bison.
21. Bison moves on in its own time; you get home without being gored.
22. You get THE CALL.  The agent wants to know a little bit more about you, what your plans are for this book and the next.  Your main goal is to remain coherent.  You ask for her clients’ contact info so you can get her references.
23. You talk to her clients.  They recommend her a thousand times over.
24. You contact the other agents you’ve queried.  You tell them you’re signing with another agent and try not to do the Wicked Witch cackle while you type those words.

And so, seven months and fifteen rejections into the querying process, I signed with Valerie Noble of Donaghy Literary Group.  She has since navigated me into a series deal with Harper Voyager, an imprint of HarperCollins.  She’s strengthened my storytelling and talked me away from multiple proverbial cliffs.  I'm so grateful to her for her expertise, her encouragement, and her willingness to bear the brunt of my literary drama.

To everyone still in the grips of querying—there’s no advice I can give you that you haven’t already read a hundred times over.  Keep at it.  Keep writing.  Make a point of connecting with people going through the same journey.  Vent (but not unprofessionally).  Cry (long and hard).  Rejoice (longer and harder).
​
And stay the hell away from bison, because seriously, all they want is to see you suffer.  

For anyone not familiar with the publishing industry, the first major step to a book deal is querying agents.  Most publishing houses will only accept manuscripts that have been accepted and vetted by literary agents.  But querying is hard.  Like, college-essay-meets-bad-breakup hard.  Every agent asks for something different in a query letter, but they generally boil down to a pitch for your novel, a short bio, comp titles (where you compare your book against other similar books), word count, and genre, all within about three to four hundred words.  Add to this herculean feat the emotional investment you have in your novel, and you're looking at weeks of rocking in the fetal position before you even start writing your letter.
 
It’s safe to say that I spent more time researching query letters, agents, and agencies than I did actually querying (at least the hands-on part… that doesn’t include the months of waiting and hours spent weeping into mugs of tea).  Many, many words have been written on how to write a good query letter, so I hesitate to add any more.  But I do want to share a few resources that directly helped me create a successful query letter—one that landed me my fantastic agent, and ultimately, my book deal.  We’ll begin with the greatest of them all (for me, anyway), Query Shark.
 
Janet Reid is a literary agent with FinePrint Literary Management, but I’m convinced she must be some kind of minor deity in whatever religion authors adhere to (Orthodox Caffeination?).  In her time off from being a full-time agent, she runs a constantly-updated, scrupulously-detailed blog in which aspiring authors send her their query letters—and she slays them.  She picks them apart line by line, revising them until they’re ready to officially query.  I’ve seen her revise the same letter six, seven, eight times, all on her own time, all for free.  The only stipulation is that those edits are then posted on her blog for hapless writers like you and me to learn from.
 
She recommends reading every single post in her archives.  I urge you to do the same, and here’s why.  Before I read her blog, I had written what I thought was a fairly passable query letter.  Once I found her blog, I started reading.  And reading and reading.  After reading every single post all the way back to 2004 (it took me weeks, but there are no shortcuts in this industry), I realized there are approximately infinity number of ways to make a mistake in a query letter, and I had made about 75 percent of them (you do the math).

I’m not going to summarize her advice, because a) it is numerous and nuanced, b) you’re better off doing your own research, and c) she has a much cleverer voice than mine.  But I will share the Ultimate Magic Formula, the greatest gift Ms. Reid gave me.  There are two remarkably straightforward formulas for getting the right information into your query and for making the most of every single word.  Think of them as those fill-in-the-blank thank-you cards you had to send after birthday parties, only with a potential book deal riding on the outcome.  Here they are.  I used the latter.
 

This plus the right amount of bio and optimal formatting for word count, comps, and genre (READ HER ENTIRE BLOG!) is ultimately (I think) what got me through the slush pile and in front of my agent’s eyeballs.  Querying is hard, convoluted, subjective work.  Fortunately, there are generous, snarky spirits like Ms. Reid out there to guide the wandering writer.  Blessed be the rich in snark!
 
You can find Janet Reid’s blog, Query Shark, at http://queryshark.blogspot.com/.