I won a query critique from professional story editors Carly Howard and Jeni Chappelle, and this week, they aired their comments on their podcast! What is a query? A query, in case you're unfamiliar, is essentially a cover letter to your book manuscript. It's supposed to entice either a literary agent or editor enough to get them to request pages of your book and/or pick up your project for publication. In other words: a good query is essential for traditional publishing! What is Story Chat Radio? Story Chat Radio is a podcast that reviews story elements in popular movies from a story editor's perspective. (My favorite episodes so far are Princess Bride and Dark Crystal.) At the end of their movie discussion, they look at a winner's query letter and talk about whether it entices them (and why or why not). I was (ahem) such a winner. I may not have been a guest on the show in the traditional sense, but my story was! My query critique is at the end of their discussion of the movie, The Lovebirds. I, personally, have never seen that movie, but their discussion on Point of View is pretty awesome. If you want to jump to where they talk about my query letter, go to 35:28 or see the snippet of the transcript below. In case you're wondering, I shared my query draft of my Dragon book. I used the comp (comparison) titles Jim Hensen's Labyrinth and Dan Gemeinhart's The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise. My thoughts on the critique? This is a really positive critique! (Yay!) I had toggled back and forth between adding in the internal stakes or leaving them out. I'm glad they asked for it, so I now know that I should have put them in the query letter like I thought. I had been worried about my word count. I wasn't sure how much room I had exactly, especially adding in the brief bio and genre (etc), so it was great to hear that I have some wiggle room for more details about the story. I never thought about being specific about my "allies" in my query letter. I've always learned not to give too many character names or unnecessary details. Anyway, my main character meets up with her grandpa in the afterlife, who is a pretty important side-character to the book! I never thought about adding him into the query, but since they're asking, I'll slip him in there. Oh, yeah...
I forgot to mention how I won the critique. All I did was retweet something that said "follow and retweet to win." That's it! Nothing fancy. ha ha! So this was a cool experience! I've been followed Carly and Jeni on Twitter for a while now. I actually belong to Jeni's online writing community on Slack, so it was pretty cool to have them look at my writing. I was nervous, but I think I did okay. I'm really grateful for the help. I'm looking forward to their next episode!
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