Rejections

By Jeri Westerson

The dreaded rejection. Does it ever end? Even published authors are not immune from rejection, I'm sorry to say. Being published does not guarantee that you are gold. Short stories in magazines, other novels in other genres...there's a long list of ways to be rejected. I thought I'd share a few of my collection over the years. Some of you may know that I started off writing historical fiction and really couldn't get my foot in the door. But the kind of historicals I liked to write--ordinary people in extraordinary settings--seemed to translate better into mystery. So I had many years of rejections. Mostly, they are form rejection letters. Often, it is a note scrawled on my query (when such things were done on paper). These were for agents and editors for my first Crispin book.

I think my favorite one was a rubber stamp slammed onto my query letter that said, "Not Interested." They were so anxious to get this rejection back to me that they didn't even seal the envelope!

By far this was the most frequent statement I received--probably the most frequent statement any author receives--especially on form rejections: We don't believe it is suitable for our list at present.

Here are just a few.

• I think you have an interesting premise--a detective mystery set in the Middle Ages. Unfortunately, I just didn't fall in love with the writing. 

• Thank you for sending this interesting piece, but we've decided to pass on the project.

• This manuscript is well written--the writing flows naturally, and it's a pleasure to read. But I'm afraid I think, on a basic level, if you've read one (medieval mystery), you've read most of them. I find, generally speaking, that medieval mysteries are just stories, often rather thin stories, dressed up in not-a-costume: Originality = poor, Setting = poor, Characters = almost good, Dialogue = good, Plotting = almost good, Excellence in writing = very good

• I thought this medieval mystery was well done but not compelling enough to overcome our marketing concerns (historical mysteries tend not to sell well for us in mass market.)

• The novel contained a convincing recreation of late medieval dialogue and atmosphere, but I'm afraid I wasn't as involved in the historical plot and characters as I needed to be. 

• We already have one British medieval series on our list and to add a second seems unwise.

• I truly enjoyed your story and look forward to reading another one. Unfortunately, this one does not meet our needs at this time.

• Protagonist seems motivated only by his immediate circumstances. We need more background angst to make him truly interesting. 

Really? Crispin needs more background angst? Boy, this is depressing me. Does it depress you? It's just as bad as any reviews that contradict each other. It just shows that opinions vary. I must remind myself that not only did I get a great agent at last, but also an editor and publisher who believed in the books. Despite the flaws of the publisher's marketing strategy, the books have all been nominated for peer and reader awards. Even with my most recent release, SHADOW OF THE ALCHEMIST, it's been nominated for tehe RT Reviewers' Choice Award for Best Historical Mystery, and Suspense Magazine named it one of the Best of 2013. Go figure. Even though the Crispin books may be down, they are definitely not out.

The takeaway from all of this is "Don't Give Up." I had many years of rejections from both agents and editors. Fourteen years of them. Just because one project doesn't work, be ready to move on to the next. You never know what will catch fire or with whom.

Are You Ready To Be Published?

When I spent my years writing novels that ended in the slushpile, I also spent a lot of time planning what would happen when one finally was published. And part of that planning was, of course, the nuts and bolts of completing a manuscript. Not only do you need to have it finished, but once it is, you need to sit down and complete the business of writing, that is, you need to write a synopsis. Not just the full synopsis for the benefit of your agent or for getting an agent, but you’ll need the 25 word pitch, the paragraph, the one page, and then the full. All of these are handy to have. The pitch is for queries and for networking when you answer that inevitable question, “What’s your book about?” Know it. Memorize it. Use it. The others are handy for query letters to agents. I also found the 25 word pitch useful in conjunction with the synopsis as a sort of introduction. I still use it on my outlines that get pitched to my editor. My agent loves them.

So you need all that to get an agent and for the agent to use to send to an editor. Given. But once that’s all done it’s time to think beyond the writing stage and start thinking about the marketing stage. When you sign a contract these days, very often the publisher wants to see a marketing plan from you.

Marketing plan, you say? Didn’t I already do the hard part and write the bloody novel? These days, that is only the beginning.

Part of that marketing plan is, of course, your online presence. Do you have a blog? Do you have a website? Are you on Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads? Are you keeping up with the ever-changing industry?

First, let’s talk blog and website. But you aren’t published, you say. What would I have to put up on a website or a blog? True, a website won’t have much more than your bio, maybe some short stories you wrote, and perhaps a few awards. But even if all you have is a bio, it’s a good idea to nail it down and to get that all important domain name (places like GoDaddy.com can help you with that). As for content, tell us about your series. Give us an excerpt of the first chapter. It’s a chance to hone your skills, to create your public persona. Are you going to be outgoing and open? Funny? Mysteriously aloof? Once the book is published it’s almost too late to get that presence on the internet, so start getting that presence well before you even finish the manuscript.

Once the manuscript is done, it will be helpful to upload a discussion guide right onto your website. A book club I visited once said that readers want as much information as they can get on a book as well as about the author when they decide on a book for their group. And providing a discussion guide is one more step in offering added value about you and your novel. In fact, my publisher picked up my discussion guide right off of my website and put it in the paperback edition, and I have done subsequent discussion guides for each of my books ever since.

Same with the blog. Please don’t give us another newbie blog on “how I’m working hard to get published” with stories about your cat and your Aunt Sadie. Unless your Aunt Sadie is a famous actress or explorer, leave her out of it. In fact, get used to being a professional. Lose the personal Facebook page or blog. Do you really want your family, your kids splashed all over the internet? Frame your blog on your book series. Is it about a detective who quilts? Then let it be about quilts. Is it a thriller set in L.A.? Then become the expert on the down and dirty of Los Angeles. You are the expert on whatever it is you write about.

And speaking of being an expert, you will want to get yourself speaking engagements at your local and not-so-local libraries, at professional organization luncheons, at any place they want to have you. And so you need to prepare some presentations, something that says a little about you and a little about your books. You can’t always do a reading of your book and, let’s face it, a lot of authors are pants at reading aloud. Have something interesting to offer by way of a presentation. I talk about medieval history and the myths people have about the era. And I bring props, my medieval weaponry. You can bet that gets an audience’s attention. Word gets out that your talk is interesting and fun. You will get asked to a lot of places. Again, remember you are the expert in whatever it is you are writing about. If you are writing a cooking mystery, then get ready with that hot plate and start talking...and cooking.

Just as you’ll need several lengths of pitches, so, too, will you need several versions of your talk. Depending on the venue, you might need a fifteen minute talk, half an hour, or full hour. Be ready and flexible to talk about you and your book in any version. But don’t hard sell it. You’re selling you as much as the book itself.

Is all this part of your marketing plan? Yes, it is! Include your marketing strategy all the places you plan to go to talk about your book and what that presentation will be. Do you have an email list to announce about your book release? You should be working on amassing that. Goodreads friends? Friends on Facebook? Do you Tweet? Do you have followers? These are the things to start on now before the book is in print.


Is it a lot of work? Yes. Is it rewarding to have your book on bookshelves and in people’s hands, in audiences that have come to hear you talk? You bet it is. But it happens because you are prepared. Prepared to hit the ground running.

Agents, Teachers, and the Age of Rude E-mails

by Julia Buckley
You know how literary agents are often forced to tell us, with gentle but firm reminders, how NOT to win their hearts? How we shouldn’t be rude, weird, inappropriate, etcetera? It’s sad that they have to tell us at all, but it is often a necessity.

How do I know, you may ask? I’m not a literary agent. No: but I am a teacher. And each day, in one way or another, I know just how those agents feel.

I recently read an article which suggested that teaching is harder than ever, due not only to the many challenges presented by students, but to the way that e-mail has empowered parents and guardians to be aggressive and even mean in a way they would not be in a face-to-face meeting.

I never experienced that phenomenon more than I have this year, during which I, as the professional, must consistently leave my busy workload and actual meetings with students to respond to the often unwarranted and almost always uninformed letters from angry parents.

Some recent examples include the father whose child’s B+ was so unacceptable to him that he wrote me a furious note, claiming that he wanted it “resolved” within the day, and if not he would meet with the principal and the president of the school.

Another parent wrote me a poorly constructed e-mail two days before an 8-week project was due, telling me that she was “perplexed” by all of my comments on the rough draft (I graded 52 of these, by the way), and that everyone she had showed it to was equally perplexed, and that “I hope you understand, Mrs. Buckley, that writing is very subjective.”

There are more and more of these notes, each week, piling up like letters to Santa. Parents who think I’m unfair. (I’m not, by any reasonable standard). Parents who are sarcastic because they don’t know how to deal with their teens and they latch onto a way to bond: we will hate the teacher together. Parents who blame me for their child's "unacceptable" grade. Parents who think their child should get a good grade even though he is missing twelve assignments.

The saddest recent example was from a parent whose child was failing because she had turned in absolutely nothing. Rather than address the real problem (and there is a real problem if a child cannot function within the school setting) the parent chose to blame me for the entire situation, saying that I “lacked compassion” when I contacted them with the news of imminent failure, and that teachers should take a child’s other stresses into account before labeling them with Fs.

There are several reasons why students earn failing grades.
1) They want them. Many a student who has sat before me is trying to send a message to a parent by refusing to do anything until his mother and father notice him, deal with him, love him.
2) They don’t think there will be consequences.
3) They intend to bring up their grades later. And then it's too late.

In the case of the first example, it is the student’s right to choose failure, and it rarely has anything to do with the things that happen in the classroom, all of which are peripheral to her problems.

In the case of the second example, I sometimes think the biggest favor a teacher can do a student is to let him earn the F and actually give it to him, ­despite the endless bullying from parents who think their child should not get the grade he has earned.

What would we be teaching children by giving in to unreasonable demands? What message do we send about the real world when we agree that it’s all right if young people don’t meet deadlines? What message does it send to the students who do consistently excellent work, who meet every requirement, when students who do nothing somehow slither into a passing grade?

Parents, wake up. In the modern teaching world, the hardest part of teaching . . . is you.

So agents, I feel your pain, in a slightly different context, every time I get a note that suggests I am missing a big truth, and the e-mailer will now educate me about that truth.

I had a teacher friend who once spoke of the scene in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE when Jimmy Stewart is pummeled by the husband of a teacher. Jimmy Stewart yells at this teacher over the phone, and later he meets her husband in a bar and the man punches him in the face.

When I was younger I always felt sorry for Jimmy Stewart in that scenario. But a teacher friend of mine changed my perspective. She said, “I’m glad that man punched George Bailey! Where did he get off making a teacher cry?”

And so I challenge all of you to a deed of Christmas kindness: write to that teacher you loved so well and tell her or him what a great job she/he did. If you have children, I encourage you to write to their teachers, as well, congratulating them for the work they do. More and more teachers , according to the article I read, are leaving their professions because they just can’t take all of the criticism they receive from all sides. It was once, they complain, just about the joy of teaching.

Oh, and while you’re at it, you might write to your agents, too. :)

(The letter pictured is not real, but it's darn close).

Everybody's Talking

by Sheila Connolly

Sandy's still recuperating, but she'll be back on Wednesdays by next week.

Time was, writers huddled in freezing garrets, scribbling with a quill pen, a lead pencil, or, later, pounding on a manual typewriter. They were solitary creatures, listening only to the voices in their heads (when they weren’t out working at menial jobs to support their creative habit) and trying to set the words down on paper. There was, of course, only one copy originally, or maybe a smudgy carbon copy or two once the mechanical device came along. This soon-tattered document circulated amongst editors and publishers, one at a time, gathering coffee-stains and dog-ears along the way, until it was judged too pathetic and the poor writer had to laboriously reproduce it.

I grew up with the oft-repeated tale from my parents, that when they were first married and living in New York City, they lived in the same building as A Writer (this was said in reverent tones). As I recall, it was Robert Ruark, who enjoyed some small fame in the 1950s and 1960s. Maybe he actually lived in the building, or maybe it was his New York pied a terre—it doesn’t really matter. What I remember is the attitude my parents held toward their neighbor, even though I don’t think they ever exchanged a word with him. He was A Writer; he was Special.

Writers were for centuries mysterious, enigmatic figures. But that’s not true any more, because, thanks largely to the Internet, we all know each other now, or at least, know of each other. What’s more, we all communicate with each other. A lot. We blog together, we email each other, we follow each other from list to list. There are no secrets any more.

This is a mixed blessing. On the plus side, we have a terrific support network—people who know what we’re going through and can commiserate about our rejections and celebrate our successes with us. We also pool agent, editor and publisher information (which I’m not sure those people have quite figured out yet, but that’s fine). Most of us who have books in print know that publishing houses dole out details with a small spoon. We have to fight to find out how many books we’ve sold, how many returns there have been, how our paper darlings are performing when compared to the rest of the herd. So to be able to compare notes with our peers; to get a glimpse into what “success” is; and to be able to cheer for a struggling newcomer, is wonderful and immensely helpful to us all, wherever we are in our career path.

But the easy availability of information also has a downside, or at least a potential one.

We all know the rules: grab the reader up front with a strong hook; if you’re writing mysteries, put the body in the first chapter; avoid backstory at all costs; show, don’t tell; end each chapter with a hook; end the book with another hook so the reader will want to buy the next book in the series. And so on. We all participate in the same online classes, for plotting, building characters, constructing the hero’s story arc. We all know which books on writing are recommended—and there are plenty of them. We all know which blogs to follow for insider information. We all know which agents are hot, and which publishers are cutting lines. In other words, we all know too much.

One of the things we know is that agents—the gatekeepers to publication—reject 98 per cent of the submissions they receive because they don’t stand out. They may be in the correct form and format, they may be competently written, polite and businesslike—but they’re all saying the same thing. Paragraph 1: please consider my time travel romantic suspense, complete at 102,000 words. Paragraph 2: Voluptuous Jane meets Hunky John on a space platform somewhere in time and they fall instantly in love. Unfortunately they both lose each other’s temporal spatial coordinates (for 287 pages). Will these star-crossed (star-crossing?) lovers find each other again without disrupting the time-space continuum? Paragraph 3: Eager writer is uniquely qualified to write this book because s/he has extensive experience in time travel, love, and IPS (that’s Intergalactic Position Systems).

And this is the norm. The swamped agent eyeballs the email query and hits delete in a nanosecond, because she’s seen it literally thousands of times before.

In short, we’ve homogenized writing. Are we better or worse off than we were when we writers labored in isolation? Or, are the books that do make it into print better or worse? We’d love to hear your opinions.

An Editor's Advice on Publishing

Sandra Parshall

John Betancourt’s Wildside Press is hundreds of miles from New York, but from his vantage point in Bethesda, Maryland, he has a clear vision of what’s happening in publishing and what the future holds. His wide-ranging talk at a recent meeting of the Sisters in Crime Chesapeake Chapter had me furiously scribbling notes so I could share his comments with PDD’s readers.

Betancourt is a successful science fiction author of many short stories and about 40 novels. He and his wife Kim started Wildside Press in 1989 to publish speculative fiction, but it has grown over the years and now publishes mysteries (including my friend Sasscer Hill’s first book, Full Mortality, out in May) as well as nonfiction, e-books and magazines. One of the company’s imprints, Juno Books, became a co-publishing venture with Simon & Schuster as of January 2009, with an emphasis on dynamic female protagonists in contemporary/urban fantasy/paranormal fiction. Authors like Carole Nelson Douglas are publishing with Juno. One of the imprint’s budding stars is Washington area writer Maria Lima, who began with an obscure small press but moved to Juno after Betancourt read her first book and fell in love with her captivating style and voice.

He came to our meeting to present the chapter’s new anthology, Chesapeake Crimes: They Had It Comin’, which Wildside is publishing. The anthology is a trade paperback, one of the formats that Betancourt believes will replace mass market paperbacks. “I’d like to see mass market paperbacks go away,” he said, pointing out the generally low quality of the paper and binding used in the books. He believes e-books will replace a lot of the print book market within a few years and could become the favored way to introduce new writers. He predicts that e-books will soon be making more money than mass market paperbacks. For print, trade paperbacks and hardcovers are of higher quality, last longer, and earn more money per copy for both the author and the publisher.

Online publishing, he believes, can be a good way for beginners to attract attention and break in. “Online publishing is your friend,” he said in answer to a chapter member’s question. “Even if it doesn’t pay, it can get attention for your writing.”

The inevitable questions about finding an agent led Betancourt to tell his own career story. He has sold his books himself, then hired agents to negotiate his contracts. He doesn’t believe agents are particularly good at selling books because of their limited contacts and their tendency to give up quickly. However, with big publishers that accept submissions only through agents, writers have no choice but to use them from the start. He advised meeting personally with an agent before signing with him or her. A personal meeting at a conference or workshop is the best way to find an agent, preferable to cold querying. Be at your best for such a meeting, he said. “Make them want to know about you and your writing. Be outgoing, funny, charming.” Sell yourself and you’ll make the agent eager to sell your work.

Publishers have become frighteningly quick to drop writers these days, Betancourt pointed out, so after signing with a publisher, you have to be pleasant to work with, or you might discover that you’re replaceable. He recalled a bestselling science fiction author of Star Trek novels who phoned her editor several times a week for lengthy conversations. The writer’s contract was dropped. The moral of the story: “Don’t piss off your editor.”

The internet offers a lot of opportunities for self-promotion, Betancourt said, but a heavy-handed me-me-me approach will turn off potential readers. Don’t plaster the internet with self-promotion and “don’t push yourself as a writer” on internet groups, he advised. “Be interesting, be entertaining, contribute something.” Nobody will read a blog that is about nothing but the writer and her new book, and if the only time you show up in an internet group is when you have something to sell, you won’t win over any readers.

A few other bits of Betancourt advice culled from my notes:

Make sure people remember you and your books. Memorable titles and memorable author names are always a plus. Betancourt advised Lynda Hill to use her middle name, Sasscer, for writing. He advised Maria Y. Lima to drop the middle initial to make her name flow more easily off the tongue. Change the spelling of your name if that will make it stand out.

Try to avoid selling the paperback rights to the same company that brings out your hardcovers. You’ll get more money by going elsewhere.

Never let an editor keep anything for more than three months. Always hold editors to the time limits they give in their guidelines or on their websites.

Try writing intelligent, thoughtful online reviews of other people’s books as a form of self-promotion. If readers respect your opinions, they’ll check out your writing.

Agent Check

by Darlene Ryan

You’re looking for an agent. You know you need to do some research. You’ve been to the websites of authors who write in the same genre as you do, to see who their agents are. You’ve checked out the acknowledgements in your favorite books to gather more agent names. You’ve checked the names at Preditors and Editors and the AAR site.

You’ve asked every writer you know about every agent on your list. And then…..you meet someone at a conference, or a workshop, at a signing or on-line and she tells you about this fabulous new agency that’s looking for writers to represent. Writers of paranormal haiku or Aztec thrillers, exactly what you’ve written. “It’s a brand new agency,” your new friend tells you. “But they have lots of contacts.” At this point you should be hearing a little warning voice in your head, your own personal, “Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!"

New literary agencies open fairly frequently. Just because you’ve never heard of someone doesn’t mean they aren’t legit. Doesn’t mean they are, either. This is where playing Super Website Sleuth comes in. We’re going to check out a couple of websites—The Nelson Literary Agency, a well-respected, legitimate, reputable literary agency, and The Scammit Agency, a not so legitimate, not so reputable agency whose name has been changed to protect the guilty.

[Disclaimer alert: The Nelson Literary Agency is not affiliated with anyone here at Poe's’ Deadly Daughters, especially me. But if they’d like to be, I have pages I can email.]

Okay, let’s go look at The Nelson Agency’s home page. It’s colorful, the font is easy to read, and there are no typos. All good. There’s a photo of Denver, where the firm is located, at the top of the page with the company address in the upper left corner. Just from this page we learn where the agency is, when it was established—2002, and how many deals they’ve completed in the last five years. Since there are several cover images on the page we even know some of the authors The Nelson Agency represents.

Now, let’s go to Scammit’s home page. It’s bright and professionally put together as well. But there’s no indication on this page of where the agency’s located. There’s no cityscape photo and no address. And there’s nothing that says how long the agency has been in business or how many deals they’ve made. But to be fair, all that information may be elsewhere on the site. Scammit does say they represent self-published and unpublished authors but there’s nothing about their published clients—no names, no deals, no covers. However, they do have a link to all the positive emails they’ve received.

Time to check out some other pages on both sites. Back to The Nelson Agency. What are our choices? We can find out more about the agency by clicking on About Us, or learn how to submit by clicking on Submissions. I’d like to know more about the agency. On this page there’s a brief blurb about Kristen Nelson and a list of the associations she belongs to. Note the SFWA membership. Sounds like a woman who would appreciate a good paranormal haiku.

[Disclaimer alert 2: Very few people actually appreciate paranormal haiku. I don’t know why, they just don’t. Please don’t send Kristin any paranormal haiku just because you read about her here. Please don’t send me any paranormal haiku either.]

Now what? We can click on a link to learn more about Kristin’s staff, or another to see who her clients are. But let’s go back to Scammit and see what we can learn About them. There’s no information here about the agency, either. Who owns the company? There are no actual agent names, or street address for the firm and no link to more details. And there’s no list of deals or clients. You can find a link to those emails from writers who’ve been taken on by Scammit, but what about the book sales? Making deals is how legitimate agents make money.

But Scammit is aggressively looking for new clients. It says so on their home page. And that should make you wary. Most reputable agents get zillions of submissions a month. They aren’t doing a lot of trolling for manuscripts. Manuscripts are falling out of the trees on their walk to work.

We could keep looking on both sites, but I think you get my point. Legitimate agencies, like The Nelson Agency, tell you who they are, what they’re looking for, and what they’ve sold.

Do your homework. A good agent, like a good bra, can lift you to the next level.

Talent, Persistence, and Luck: How to get your book published

Elizabeth Zelvin

Even though my first mystery isn’t out yet, I periodically get requests from friends and colleagues to allow someone who is writing a book or wants to write a book to contact me. I know what they want to know: "Can you help me get my book published?" I can tell them what it takes: the proverbial talent, persistence, and luck--in most cases, including mine, a drop of luck in a sea of persistence. But can I help them? Not quite the way they hope. Why me? Either it’s because I live in New York, or the aspiring author is a fellow mental health professional, or, simply, I’ve written a mystery and miraculously found a publisher. I have been tremendously grateful for every speck of encouragement, support, and generosity I’ve gotten from established mystery writers along the way. I’m glad to respond to an email and give what tips I can. But the truth is that there are no short cuts. I thought it might be helpful to put what I can say in one place (ie the archives of Poe’s Deadly Daughters) where I can refer people to it rather than reinvent the wheel each time. So here it is. If you want to publish a book, here’s what you have to do:

1. Write the book. The whole book. That’s true for the first novel, whether it’s literary, genre, or mainstream fiction. It doesn’t matter if you’ve published in other fields. If you haven’t published any kind of novel, you’re an unpublished writer as far as the fiction world is concerned. I had two books of poetry and a book on gender and addictions. It didn’t matter.

1a. If you’re, say, an academic or professional who’s published in scholarly journals and with professional presses, and you want to write nonfiction for the popular market, you’re still an unpublished writer as far as trade publishing is concerned. You don’t have to write the whole book. You do have to write a complete outline and sample chapters. There are books that can tell you how to do this correctly. You also need a platform: an audience or market or public visibility that will sell your book. Being an experienced professional with an interesting career is not a platform. The ideal platform? You’re already Oprah when you decide to write a book.

2. Get critique. Revise. Kill your darlings. A first draft can always be improved upon, and considering how tough the market is, you need every advantage you can get. I learned this slowly and the hard way. But if you know you can’t tolerate criticism or rejection, reconsider your dream of getting published.

3. Research agents. There are no short cuts. I queried 125 agents—including two who took me on and gave up too quickly, as well as maybe 40% who liked my query letter well enough to read a full or partial manuscript—before I sold Death Will Get You Sober. Some good places to research agents, all updated annually (or more frequently if online):
. LMP (Literary Market Place). THE reference—read it in the library.
. Jeff Herman’s Guide to Book Publishers, Editors, and Literary Agents.
. WritersMarket.com. I subscribed to the online service for $30/year, didn’t bother with the book. It’s updated constantly. Most helpful feature for the newbie: it gives the percentage of new and unpublished authors each agent represents. You can then use that as a hook in your query letter: “I understand you are receptive to new authors…”
. AgentQuery.com.
There are others, but these will give you plenty to work with. Oh, and check each agent’s website before you send your query. They may include submission criteria and biases (not in a bad way) that don’t appear in the guides and directories.

4. Write a killer query letter. Keep it on one page, and don’t try to squeeze in more with no margins and smaller fonts. They’ll know.
Paragraph one: Your hook and what kind of book you’ve written. If you can say “So-and-so suggested I ask if you would consider…” that’s great. But if you don’t have a contact, the hook can be that you know they represent the kind of book you’ve written or that they do take on new authors. If you met them at a conference or even at a party, that’s great too.
Paragraph two: A concise description of the book. Make it sparkle.
Paragraph three: Who you are, ie what’s interesting about you and why you’re qualified to write this particular book.

5. Write a synopsis. Expand the paragraph describing the book in your query letter into a one-page synopsis. Be prepared to parlay it into 300 words, 500 words, and three pages as needed.

6. Get a support network—local or online or both. If you’re a woman writing a mystery, join Sisters in Crime, and then join the Guppies, which is the online chapter for prepublished writers. They’ll hook you up with a critique group, help you polish your query and synopsis, share the scoop on agents they’ve contacted, eat virtual chocolate in commiseration when you get rejection letters, and drink virtual champagne when you find an agent or a publisher. If you’re a guy writing a mystery, ask yourself: do you have the guts to be a male Sister? There really is nothing quite like Guppies for men. Your local chapter of Sisters in Crime may be supportive and helpful too. So may your local chapter of Mystery Writers of America. Online, mystery lovers (not just writers) hang out at DorothyL.com and crime fiction lovers (all part of the spectrum) at CrimeSpace.ning.com. Folks on these lists and sites will point you toward others. Many will be helpful. I don’t know if anything like the good will of the mystery community exists in other genres. We are lucky!

7. Start sending out those query letters. Include a stamped self-addressed envelope with your query. Don't email queries unless the directory and/or the agent says they accept them. Follow submission guidelines on the agent's website. Your support network will help you not take those form rejections too personally and share your elation and despair when you get what we call a “rave rejection.”
7a. Keep sending out.

8. KEEP WRITING.