Ask the Editor is a column for your questions about the editing process and editors themselves. It also features first-page critiques. Want to be considered? Submit your question or submit your pages.
Today’s Ask the Editor is sponsored by Book Pipeline. FINAL DEADLINE: Friday, Sept. 15th for the 2023 Book Pipeline Unpublished contest. Last chance to compete this season! Awarding $20,000 to authors across 8 fiction & nonfiction categories. Multiple writers have signed with top lit agents and been published over the past few seasons. Register now.
Question
A few months ago, I submitted my query letter to a well-known, respected query editor, and at the same time to a writing podcast (Print Run—I’m a Patreon member). I got very positive feedback from the show. The agents had small suggested changes, but they liked how clean and simple the query was.
Feedback from the paid editor was much less positive. She said the query was basically only a concept and I needed to significantly expand it to explain a lot more.
I rewrote the query letter as the editor suggested. My gut says the original query was better. But…I paid for professional feedback, so I feel obligated to go with that professional’s opinion.
Do I listen to my gut and the two unpaid professionals? Or listen to the paid editor? I suppose a third option is to try querying with both letters to see if I get a better response to one versus the other.
—Querying in California
Dear Querying in California,
Have you ever gotten a bad haircut? Back when the “Rachel” was a big deal, I asked for one. I’m sure it discomfited the whole salon when I locked myself in the bathroom and cried on the floor at how bad I thought I looked. The stylist gave me exactly what I asked for, but it still wasn’t me.
Point being, getting what you paid for isn’t always getting what you need.
If it helps you feel better about the money, average it out—you got advice from three professionals and paid for one. Agents Laura Zats and Erik Hane from Print Run have seen thousands of queries, and they liked yours. Your query sold your book to their taste. Their taste. Another person thought you needed something different, to suit—you guessed it!—their taste.
We will always get conflicting feedback. If one friend-reader loves your manuscript opening, another may think it’s too slow. One agent’s “I love your concept and can’t wait to read more” is another agent’s form rejection. Since your query has already been read in a public forum, let’s look at some highlights.
The original query:
[BOOK TITLE] is a 81,000 word, single-POV, standalone Contemporary Romance. It would appeal to fans of Head Over Heels by Hannah Orenstein, Part of Your World by Abby Jimenez, and From Lukov With Love by Mariana Zapata.
Your metadata, the nuts-and-bolts info about the book, is very clear. Word count, genre, and two details specific to your genre: that this book is told in one POV and it’s not part of a series.
Katherine Parker doesn’t have dreams, she has plans. They include: perfectly balanced macronutrients; workouts, scheduled in fifteen minute increments; and, one day, rowing for gold in the Olympics. Her plans do not include getting dumped by her jerk-of-a-boyfriend right before her World Cup final. Kath loses by a mile. Then she’s promptly kicked off the team and out of the only home she’s ever loved–the Olympic training center.
Here, we run into a hitch I call “did-not-didn’t.” Tell us what Katherine does do/have/want, rather than opening with the opposite and switching, which jars the reader. Plus, the boyfriend’s clearly a jerk from context. How about this instead:
Allison’s revision: Katherine Parker’s perfectly balanced diet and meticulously scheduled workouts are going to take her to row for Olympic gold. But when her boyfriend dumps her right before her World Cup final, Kath finishes last and gets kicked off the team and out of the only home she’s ever loved—the Olympic training center.
Your next paragraph:
Okay, new plan. With only half a summer to win back her spot–and zero bandwidth for love–Kath returns to her hometown. Unfortunately, she’ll have to train alongside a gaggle of high school rowers and their coach, Adrian Crawford. And Adrian has opinions. Like, instead of supplement-stacked smoothies, he thinks rest days should be spent with corn dogs and mini golf. Worse, he has wide shoulders that even a rower would envy and, when he looks at Kath, he sees more than lists and neuroticism. Perfectly laid plans in tatters, Kath finds herself falling for this full-hearted coach. But if she’s serious about the Olympics–and moving back to the training center–how can her future include Adrian?
The “Okay” diminishes the stakes that are about to be beautifully set up! She’s got a ticking clock, a compelling reason to be in close proximity with the love interest, and a compelling reason not to get together. Perfect romance setup, and this also reveals some of the book’s snappy, contemporary voice.
Let’s take a look at the revised query you wrote after paid feedback. In the new query, the opening paragraph is the same. There’s a small adjustment at the end of the paragraph with the set-up:
Kath bombs the race. Then, she also loses her spot on the national team, her residency in the Olympic Training Center, and all of her remaining sponsors.
But in the original, “the only home she’s ever loved” suggests backstory and existing conflict in Kath’s life. That she doesn’t have much of a support system, which raises the stakes. Losing sponsors means losing income, but what the reader cares about is her heart. But what if we work them into the second paragraph?
Allison’s revision: With only half a summer to win back her spot–and zero bandwidth for love–Kath returns to her hometown. Without sponsors to foot the bill, she’ll have to train alongside a gaggle of high school rowers and their coach, Adrian Crawford.
Now she has a reason to train with high schoolers. More of the revised query:
It’s about as hopeless as a cracked hull.
Ouch. This sounds like an older voice. A gee-shucks voice.
That is, until she’s given a deal to train under Adrian Crawford, her hometown’s high school coach who’s in the running for an elite-level job. If Kath can give him an unbiased evaluation–and get top three at Pan Ams in two months–USRowing will give her the spot back.
Her deal, his job, her evaluation, and a race and a time span and an organization—plus, these are all calculated, business decisions, not romance. They belong in the book but aren’t needed in the query.
Unfortunately, Adrian loves to veer off plan. Like, instead of grinding out laps in an inlet, he has Kath enduring open-water waves. And instead of smoothies and stretching, he thinks rest days should be spent with corn dogs and mini golf. Worst of all, Kath isn’t so irritated by these disruptions. In fact, for the first time in a long time, she’s actually happy.
In this paragraph, your revision uses a nice technique—the conflicts between them are a little more directly related to character. We’re seeing what he does that makes her crazy instead of what he thinks.
Yet, falling for this full-hearted coach is a terrible idea. Love, after all, got her into this damn mess in the first place. Also, Kath is reviewing him for a job. Finally, she’s supposed to be serious about the Olympics and moving back to the training center. So, how can any of her future plans include Adrian?
“Damn mess” = double ouch. And listing four of Kath’s reasons as equally important makes none of them important.
Strategically, to sell a book, this query is still reasonably solid. We’ve got conflict and stakes, and the evolution of the relationship is clear.
But it’s not your voice.
The same details—lost race, high school training environment, hot coach-she-can’t-fall-for are in both queries. But one sounds like fun contemporary romance and one sounds dated.
You already know which query to use, with a couple of tweaks, so I’ll answer the question you didn’t ask:
Did I waste my money?
Nope.
Paying for feedback is a great idea for those who can afford it. When I was querying, I bid at charity auctions in which agents who otherwise didn’t do query critiques donated their services. And agents and editors do give conflicting advice, because their taste differs. Someone’s great haircut is someone else’s nightmare.
But any feedback is valuable. When you receive it, pay attention to your own reactions. What makes you think, “Oh yeah, I hoped that would work but it didn’t?” What makes you push back? Then analyze why. Why should the query/sentence/story be your way and not the other way? What can you do more of in your writing to support that choice?
Even feedback we disagree with is valuable—if we take that next step.
Today’s Ask the Editor is sponsored by Book Pipeline. FINAL DEADLINE: Friday, Sept. 15th for the 2023 Book Pipeline Unpublished contest. Last chance to compete this season! Awarding $20,000 to authors across 8 fiction & nonfiction categories. Multiple writers have signed with top lit agents and been published over the past few seasons. Register now.
Allison K Williams has edited and coached writers to publication with many of the best-known outlets in media. As a memoirist, essayist, and travel journalist, Allison has written craft, culture and comedy for National Public Radio, CBC-Canada, the New York Times, and many more. She leads the Rebirth Your Book writing retreats series and, as Social Media Editor for Brevity, she inspires thousands of writers with weekly blogs on craft and the writing life. Allison holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Western Michigan University and spent 20 years as a circus aerialist and acrobat before writing and editing full-time. Her latest book is Seven Drafts: Self-Edit Like a Pro From Blank Page to Book (Woodhall Press, 2021). Learn more at her website.
Hi Allison, loved your insights on this. I’m wondering about story summary length. I’ve listened to some Manuscript Academy podcasts with agents going over queries. I’m surprised by the synopsis-length plot summaries in the query letters, which they had no qualms about.
For years I’ve heard and taught that the query letter should be short (half-page, ideally) and have at most two paragraphs (elevator pitch) describing the plot. Has this truly changed so that now good query letters are two pages with extensive story summaries?
Thanks!
This is such a great question! I generally advise 250-350 words, maybe a bit longer for narrative nonfiction or a book that’s very culturally relevant. I haven’t heard the Manuscript Academy podcast in a while, but I was listening to The Sh*t No-one Tells You About Writing recently, and they mostly advise 300-400 words.
Dear Querying, even the phrases which Allison suggested rewriting were great. Your voice definitely comes through and its breezy, well thought-out, and gives a real sense of the story. You mentioned using both versions and doing a kind of a comparison test-that will be hard to do because there are so many other variables at play that don’t have anything to do with your query-does the agent have another client who’s written a similar story? Is he/she not in the right mood for a sports story? did he/she get out of bed on the wrong side this morning? Allison made some great suggestions – just wanting to point out even your original sentences were clever and would stand out in the slush pile.
Thank you!
This was so helpful! Thank you Querying in California for sharing and Allison for such great insights–not just on query edits but processing all of the little voices that haunt us navigating this career.
So glad to hear that!
Thanks to both of you for this timely post – I am currently working through the feedback from four beta-readers, and the sometimes quite different reactions to aspects of the story.
I am glad they were NOT in agreement, point-for-point; I think seeing the story through their different “lenses” is a more accurate reflection of a (hopefully, eventual) wider readership. But it was hard at first to know how to approach the conflicting feedback, as in “who do I believe?”
After reading this post and the thoughtful critique, I was reminded to consider it all, take from it what is useful, and in the end, believe myself.
I find, too, with beta readers – look for commonalities, and look for where they might differ on *what* the problem is, but they agree on *where* the problem is.