You told me: TITLE, a fantasy novel for the middle grade, young adult or general audience, is (description). This 140,000-word manuscript is Book 1.
First: middle grade, young adult, and general audience are three separate and distinct markets. What you said is akin to saying "everyone will like my book" and we don't need to revisit what an error in logic that is, now do we?
Second: even IF this is intended for a general audience, 140,000 words is really at the high end of things. 100,000 is better, 125k is ok.
If you really intend this for middle grade, 140,000 words is three times too long, and for a YA novel it's two times too long.
Am I going to explain all this to you in a rejection letter? No. I'm going to say "not right for me" and hope you go to a writing conference and pick up some tips on how the industry works.
Oh, and I'm going to blog about it just in case anyone else is contemplating doing this.
7 comments:
Dear Janet Reid, Literary Agent's Blog:
I always feel so much less inadequate when I come visit you. Today I feel almost pretty. This 34 word comment is Comment 1.
Sincerely,
Mags' Query Letter
Dear Ms Reid, Ms Reid's Friends, Associates, really close friends, relatives, and almost relatives:
I am sending you the first 100 chapters (they're really short. goats have short attention spans) of The Goats of Garp. It's a Kid's fantasy about a young goat that runs away from home and moves into the Ritz-Carlton.
Because he strayed onto a secret nuclear reservation and ate contaminated berries, he can easily morph into hotel furniture. This allows him to hide successfully and to move from room to room without being noticed too much.
Unfortunately, a kleptomaniac princess steals the over stuffed goat-hair chair from her suit. She has her chauffer Georg (you say that gay-org) carry it down the fire escape and shove it into the trunk of her stretch limo. The chair is really our hero.
The princess smuggles the chair/goat onto her Lear Jet and takes him home to the Principality of Gorp. It's a mountainous country right on the border between Italy and Lithuania. They raise goats. Their primary exports are goat-hair vests and cheese.
The goat-hero escapes the royal palace. Interpol is called in to search for what the princess thinks of as a double purloined chair. All the while our goat-hero is on the hills right outside the palace, hiding in plain site. (His mommy read The Purloined Letter to him when he wasn't even tail high.)
He's keeping a wether eye (this is a goat-joke and not a misspelling, in case you didn't notice) out for the palace police. However a cute wagging tail turns his attention to other things. He ends up rescuing the world's cutest doe (you pronounce that doh, but you don't spell it that way.) from a fate worse than a bath.
They elope, running away to Andorra, a spot more or less on the border of France and Spain. It's right next door to France and Spain.
This is a YA fantasy with great crossover potential. It should also appeal to elderly goat-herds and people named Bo-peep.
Other than coming up with a really catchy name for my hero, it's finished at 270 thousand words. Book 2 will be slightly longer, but under a million words.
I hope you enjoy it. I'd be happy to send the entire mss to you via armored car, bound securly with wire (we goats don't have twine.) and guarded by ten security guards.
Best regards,
William (Bill) E. Goat, III
actually the only reason I REALLY blog about this is to find out what Bill E is up to.
I'm not sure I've laughed this hard in a week ("fate worse than a bath" just did me in, but gay-org, and the chair as hero got me started)
I'm happy to have found Bill E once again. Life wasn't the same without him.
Dear Janet,
Mr. Goat wants me to ask if your laughter is a "yes," or a "no."
If it's a no, he wants to know if you even faintly interested in a detailed history of the Goat Gods of the Ancient East through their representation in the myth of Medieval Europe.
He suggests that there is endless interest in the subject and that there is a great tie in with the recently released Vatican Library collection of material on the Templars.
He claims that a distant ancestor of his actually posed for the first Bophomet image. He says he has the documentation to prove it. I have to warn you that I haven't seen it.
He also claims to have assembled all the facts about the vampire goats of Scotland and their role in the formation of the first Masonic Lodge in Skye.
He says he's well qualified to write about Goat gods because all the nannies worship him. I am left without a suitable comment.
Please let him down gently. He's very sensitive. And for God's sake, don't mention the problem he's having with his tail! Broken tails are so embarrassing.
Yours truly,
Sha'el,
Princess of Pixies,
Queen of Goats,
Suzerain of Fairy.
Hi McKoala!
I've done rewrites on the first four chapters of Pixie Sword. Expect them in a month or so over there at the Crapometer. Chapter five is giving me fits, but it's almost done.
he can easily morph into hotel furniture. This allows him to hide successfully and to move from room to room without being noticed too much.
I laughed up a barrel of smoke with this. (I'm scant miles from the Santiago fire in CA)
Sha'el, I think you should consider publishing The Bill E. Goat Letters. Sure fire hit.
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