Sunday, April 28, 2013

Sunday Brunch at the Question Emporium


Hello! I have three short query questions.
Firstly, what is the best font to use in a query? Secondly, how many credentials are too many?
Can you offer any advice on keeping my query at/under 250 words?

(1) Times New Roman or Courier

(2) It's too many if your list has more words than the number of words telling what your book is about.  Prioritize: published work first. Anything else is just filler.

(3) Focus on the plot of the novel. There are a lot of queries at QueryShark.blogspot.com that show how to do that.

5 comments:

drw said...

Good morning Janet,
I'd like to tag along with another question about credentials. My published work is all academic stuff and I never wrote a novel before the one I'm querying. How specific should I be about those publications?
Thank you!

NotaWarriorPrincess said...


Hi drw! I'm in your same boat. The way I put it was "I'm an academic. I have published articles with colons in the titles, in journals read by about seventeen people. But really SMART people."

I think the description of the actual plot of the book in that query was more important than listing pubs; if an agent is interested enough in your novel to want more, she will google-stalk you eventually and find those gems of academic death-prose all by herownself.

Ellipsis Flood said...

I remember a statement from QueryShark, about academic writing being the opposite of creative writing in terms of style. So I don't think that academic writing is that important for a creative writing query, since being good at one doesn't indicate anything about the other.

Terri Lynn Coop said...

NotAWarriorPrincess wins the Internet today with the first paragraph of her comment. I, too, have written for that audience of 17, and dang it, at least two of them liked it!

Terri

drw said...

Terry, maybe we have two readers in common? :)
Well, somebody told me that if you've published in academic journals you must know about editors and about respecting deadlines. so adding those credits could be a point in your favor.
I'm still not sure...