Hello everyone,
It’s been another busy week, but I’ve been trying to stay productive in my path to publishing! I’ve been learning so much about querying and how to prepare for it. I had no idea there was so much involved when submitting a manuscript.
First I researched Query Letters, reading as many as I could find, and started to build off of that. From what I understood, they’re supposed to be short, concise, and engaging paragraphs to hook someone into wanting to read the book. That sounds easy enough, what’s another few hundred words after writing a full novel? Apparently a lot… It took me nearly an entire day to write get those 300 words to a happy place.
The next project for my literary querying package was my Synopsis. I now know that I had no idea what a synopsis was. A 1-2 page spoiler-filled breakdown of my novel. And I thought the query letter was hard. but breaking down every chapter of my book turned out to be a nightmare.
After a few days of pulling out my hair, I was finished. I had an extremely long synopsis and a messy query letter. After getting some super helpful feedback on both, it was time for a rewrite on both projects.
That’s when I was turned toward this article How To Write a 1-Page Synopsis and the lightbulbs went on. I was able to use it to break down my story into a 1-page synopsis, less than half of what I had previously (1000 words to 480). It was clearer, more concise, and I was actually happy reading it!
Finishing the synopsis first actually made writing the blurb in the query letter a lot easier. Something I will have to remember for future manuscripts.
So now I have a query letter and synopsis that I can start to share and hopefully get some feedback on!