Inspiring Tomorrow's Space Explorers: A New Query Letter

After my rejection last week by Writers House, I decided I need to punch up my query letter to emphasize the business opportunity my book presents.

Although I started writing the Onyx Sun series as a fun book for my son, Aiden, I am realizing it could also encourage kids to engage in math and science through the technologies those subjects enable. My book is replete with technology developed by Zack's grandfather, like large robots, rocketships, and fast jets, which should inspire kids. This is important because I've learned while working at Riverdeep that American kids score lower than almost every other developed nation in math and science scores. I am starting to think my book might be able to help turn the tide.

One of the keynotes at this year's NSTA (National Science Teacher's Association) emphasized during her speech that before we can expect kids to spend long hours pouring over textbooks, we have to inspire them to want to do so. In America we have a strange anomaly compared to the rest of the world whereby math and science are considered geeky. Maybe it's our sport-oriented culture, maybe it's just random, but the fact is kids don't want to study math and science because they don't think it's cool. They are not inspired.

My book can help change that. In an increasingly technological world, I think math and science have to become cooler if we're going to keep up. Gone are the days I grew up in when playing PC games was just for geeks. Now, kids of all ages, as well as adults, play XBox, PS3, and PC games. That's a step in the right direction, and books can help more than they currently are.

When you look at the bookshelves in bookstores today, you see a lot of YA fiction that centers around one of two categories: (1) fantasy or (2) reality. There's little-to-no science-fiction, which is interesting to me because sci-fi straddles these two genres. Sci-fi has a historical precedence of taking crazy ideas and making them reality. The Internet, space travel, genetic engineering...these were all considered science fiction until they gave way to science fact. Issaac Asimov and Jules Verne inspired people who became visionaries like Bill Gates and Richard Branson.

That's what our kids need! They need inspiration in what could exist but doesn't quite yet! I don't care how you slice it, no matter where we head in the next two hundred years, this planet will never see one dragon, elf, or fairy. While those things are fun to read and write about, they will never exist, while walking on Mars, settling the Moon, and exploring outer space will.

So, if we're going to inspire our kids in math and science, let's start reading them books that talk about attainable dreams. We're already exploring space, but we need to inspire them to take today's efforts further. So much awaits us out there: potential motherloads of raw materials, alternative sources of energy, new colonies to develop, etc.

So, it is with this passion and vision for how my book can help this that I have revised my cover letter to the following:

--- BEGIN LETTER ---

Specific Person
Agency
Address
Address

Dear (Agent/Editor’s Name):
I am seeking representation for my young adult chapter novel The Incredible Origins of the Onyx Sun, complete at 83,500 words.

My book follows ten-year-old Zack Goodspeed, after he discovers his grandfather has invented a spaceship powered by an infinite energy source called the Onyx Sun. Stowing away on the ship, Zack is stranded on the Moon, thrown into life-threatening conflicts, and forced to confront an enemy bent on using the Onyx Sun to wipe out all life on Earth.

I believe my book will be popular with young adults for a number of reasons:
- Space 2.0: Children have always loved space. It provides a realm of infinite imaginative possibilities, and now we near a Second Golden Age of Space. Virgin Galactic is creating the first space tourists. A human will walk on Mars. My book is part of these events, which will define the next generation.
- Engagement in Math & Science: We need to inspire American kids to engage in math and science if we are to maintain our international competitiveness. I have designed my book to present plots, characters, and environments that will engage children in the exciting possibilities of technology and space.
- A Series Novel: This book is the first in a series, which will maximize backlist potential. I have already started the sequel: The Wicked Adversaries of the Onyx Sun. Five novels will ultimately comprise the series covering space exploration, colonization, interplanetary war, and first contact with aliens.
- A Familiar Format, an Underdeveloped Genre: With my book, I have used familiar elements from popular young adult novels in an environment (i.e. space) I am passionate about and consider underdeveloped as a mass market genre.
- Relevant to World Events: My book explores terrorism, alternative energy, and internationalism to help young adults understand their lives in a global context.

I have published several articles and poems. I currently work for educational publisher Houghton Mifflin Riverdeep Group and understand how to capture kids’ attention. My business background and education (BA, Northwestern; MBA, Babson) have given me the skills to sell my novel to parents, teachers, and children. I am a member of SCBWI.

In my research, you have consistently arisen as a quality source of representation. I hope you will contact me at your earliest convenience for the entire manuscript.

Sincerely,
Christopher Mahoney

What I Like About This Letter

• Makes a full business case: I mention several reasons my book is unique and a good business opportunity. In a bulleted list, these issues are easy to scan and assess.
• Synopsis is tight: The book synopsis is concise, perhaps too much so.
  

What I Don't About This Letter

• Too formal: Looks like a business proposal. Is not enough of a compelling story. The bullets especially look business-y.
• Too scattered: The fact I didn't focus on just one or two appeals for why my book is so unique looks scatter-shot.

The First Rejection

Well, after two months of waiting on tenterhooks for Writers House to review my entire manuscript, I heard back today. They were very courteous to give me a personalized write-up of my manuscript, but of course I can't help but be disappointed. I know how hard it is to get published, but for a glimmer of a moment, I thought Writers House initial interest might translate into one of those rarefied occasions when a new author gets picked up immediately.

For posterity's sake, here's the letter:



Kalamazoo!



Christopher

A Hit! An Agent Unexpectedly Responds

I can't believe the serendipity of what just happened!

Back in April, I sent my newly minted agent submission package (consisting of a query letter, return postcard, and the first three chapters of my book) to Writers House. To me, Writers House is the Harvard of agencies. They have been around for a long time, are consistently mentioned as having the best agents, and represent some of the top authors in publishing. Given all this, I decided to submit to them first and to give them exclusive opportunity to review my work before I submit to any other agent.

Then the long wait began.

For those uninitiated to the trials of being a new author, you would be shocked the lag-time in this industry considering we are well into the Internet Age. It still amazes me that I have turned on multi-million dollar, global web applications to the barrage of immediate feedback, and I still have to wait two-to-four months for one response from an agent. It makes sense that they get overwhelmed by inquiries and have to put an earnest effort into reading each one, but I really wonder sometimes if the Internet could help streamline this effort somehow. This seems on the surface to be an industry in dire need of modernization.

Regardless, time passed, and I fell into that funk of waiting so many authors will tell you they have experienced. It's a strange feeling of quasi-rejection. You're not really rejected during this time, but you're definitely not accepted either. You are in limbo awaiting some stranger's judgment. It's surreal.

But where the serendipity of this all comes in is that during this time, and probably somewhat sooner than I today realized, Writers House had accepted me! I was working from home today when I decided to take the recycling out. We have two blue bins for our recycling. One we use almost all the time. The other we leave outside by the garbage bins, collecting rain water. It's almost like having a house cat, and a mangy outside dog no one ever plays with. So, I decided, in a moment of strange pity for an inanimate object, to switch out the bins. It was time for the dog to come in and the cat to sit out.

That's when I saw it: one of my return postcards, lying at the bottom of the outside bin, damp with this morning's dew. At first, I thought I'd recycled a postcard I'd never sent. After all, in creating the postcards exactly as I wanted, I had printed several "prototypes" to get the custom text on the back of the card just right.

I plucked the postcard from the bin to check. That's when my mild surprise became glee. On the back of the postcard was a voided stamp. This was one that I had sent to an agent and had been sent back! This must be from Writers House since they were the only one I've queried so far.

It was almost too much for me to scan down the back of the card to where I had printed the accept/reject check boxes. But as my eyes fell, my heart leaped. Writers House wanted to see more! I jumped into the air and yelled, much to the surprise of my neighbor watering her plants, then ran inside to call my girlfriend, Kim.

Amazing! Writers House is asking for the entire manuscript, which I'll send first thing tomorrow.

Kalamazoo!



Christopher

Happy Birthday My Boy!

Three years old. Love ya buddy.

My First Query Letter

The following, as promised last week, is an example of the first query letter I ever sent out. My letters have evolved until the most recent version. So, I post this for a comparison between where I started, and where I am now.

What I Like About This Letter

• The quote in the header: I wanted to make an immediate impression with the tone of the book and my writing style. Agents always say they want the sample chapters to immediately impress them with the writer's unique style and that a writer should include that style in the writing the query letter. I decided to front-load this and integrate some sample text, that doesn't actually appear in the book, into the query letter.
• Personal connection: Much of the material I read on writing query letters said you should try to personalize your story to the agent. So, the second paragraph, where I discuss what space meant to me, and means to all kids, I thought achieved that
• Closing: It's a little uber-entrepreneurial, but I think the comparison works between trusted networking of investor/advisers and agents/advisers.
  

What I Don't About This Letter

• Length: It's too long. Some of the wordiness in the synopsis and qualification sections could be reduced.
• Non-germane credentials: My writing credentials section doesn't contain enough pure writing qualifications. At first I thought showing I could sell a book might grab an agent's attention, but I realized after a while this section should focus on more pure publication qualifications.
• Word count: I should have kept it simple. 79,900 words is basically 80,000. Now, I just round up/down to the nearest 1,000.
  

--- BEGIN LETTER ---

“Who could have guessed the small, black cube that helped man colonize the stars could also be used to wipe out humanity? Whoops. Sorry about that.”

- Geoffrey Gumbean, Chief Research Scientist

Excerpt from the Senate Inquiries into the Uber-abnormal Affairs of the Onyx Sun

Specific Person
Agency
Address
Address

Dear (Agent/Editor’s Name):

I am seeking representation for my young adult novel, The Incredible Origins of the Onyx Sun, complete at 79,900 words.

As a child, I loved the boundless imaginative possibilities the exploration of space offers. These dreams are now becoming reality as entrepreneurs like Richard Branson and Elon Musk lead us back to the stars. Thanks to their efforts, today’s children will be the first generation of citizen-astronauts, and books like The Incredible Origins of the Onyx Sun may inspire them to continue the journey. As Dr. Sally Ride stated, “Our future lies with today's kids and tomorrow's space exploration.” These words were never truer.

The Incredible Origins of the Onyx Sun follows the story of Zack Goodspeed, a fairly average ten-year-old, who discovers his genius-inventor grandfather has secretly built man’s first interstellar spaceship. By stowing away on this ship, Zack is thrust into a series of adventures that land him on the Moon, throw him into life-threatening situations, and culminate in his saving humanity itself.

The Incredible Origins of the Onyx Sun is the first book in a series. I am currently working on the sequel, The Wicked Adversaries of the Onyx Sun.

Book Synopsis
Zack Goodspeed is a perfectly normal ten year-old boy, growing up in a perfectly normal suburb. His friends are all normal. His teachers are normal. His mother and father are practically Mr. and Mrs. Normal. Everything in Zack’s life is exceptionally normal save one thing: his grandfather, Fyodor.

By any measure, Fyodor Confucius Goodspeed is just plain whacked. He towers over most people at six-feet, six-inches tall. He wears only white, because he can’t bother to spend time matching his pants to his shirt to his socks. He stumbles about, distracted by inner thoughts, like someone who just learned to walk.

Yet, Fyodor is an incredible genius who has just built man’s first interstellar spacecraft powered by a small, black cube called the Onyx Sun. The Onyx Sun is Fyodor’s greatest invention. The Onyx Sun provides unlimited power. The Onyx Sun whisks Zack away on a series of adventures into space.

Freed from his earthbound normalcy, Zack walks on the Moon, meets bold, new friends, and learns how to pilot skyscraper-sized robots called “Mech Leviathans”. Ultimately, he saves humanity from Dr. Ian Machvel, an antagonist whose one aim is to pervert the Onyx Sun into a weapon of mass destruction. In the process, Zack faces many issues relevant to today’s young people, including confronting terrorism, gaining self confidence, and appreciating one’s family.

Credentials
I have been writing stories since I was eight. At Northwestern University, I studied economics but found Atlas Shrugged struck me deeper than Keynesian economics.

I have published a poem which appeared in Summer Shade: a Collection of Modern Poetry. Until recently, I managed a literary company called Pariah Publishing (www.pariahpublishing.com), where I gained insight into the dynamics of good writing through personally reviewing and critiquing over 400 manuscripts. I am currently a Product Manager for Riverdeep, an educational software developer, where I frequently interact with children in my book’s target demographic.

I am an MBA graduate of Babson College, the #1 School for Entrepreneurship in the US, where I won the prestigious Price-Babson Fellowship and conducted research under Stephen Spinelli, the man who built and sold Jiffy Lube. Accordingly, I understand the business commitment required to launch successful ventures, like a new book. I also co-edited publications from the tenured professors during this time.

Agency Representation
Much as an entrepreneur seeks investors who can provide business acumen as well as financing, I am looking for an agent who can provide credible feedback on my work as well as representation. In my research, you have consistently arisen as such a source. I wish to submit my manuscript to you and (agency name here...in this case, as my first choice, it was Writers House), exclusively and foremost.

Sincerely,
Christopher Mahoney

How to Write Query Letters That Don't Suck

I have entered into a whole new, more challenging part of the writing process: writing a query letter that doesn't suck. If you are a new writer finishing up your first manuscript, just wait...you thought it was hard to press through those lackluster chapters, find words when they wouldn't come, or make your story hold together believably? Nope, that was just the warm-up. Writing query letters...that's when the real "fun" begins.

In writing a book, the author is quite often the sole gateway to what content is placed on the page and how much of it. In writing a query letter though, you have to take all that content and boil it down to a one-page letter that is interesting and unique. The agent runs this game and the trick is standing out from the crowd since they see thousands of query letters a year, each claiming to be from the author of the next Da Vinci Code.

To kick-off this process, I read a few books recommended to me by writer friends as well as more than a few Writer's Digest articles on the subject. The best of the books was How to Write Attention Grabbing Query & Cover Letters, which puts aside the infomercial veneer too many books in this genre take on in favor of practical, concise suggestions for writing great query letters. It also includes some example query letters, which I found interesting but wasn't quite sure they would fit my book or writing style.

Next, I went a little nuts. I wrote sixteen versions of my first query letter over a year before I sent a single one. Thankfully, I started writing them while I was working on my book so they haven't held up my book going out to agents now the manuscript is done. However, I do think looking back this was overkill. My thought at the time the insanity started was that if I just wrote the right query letter, with the right combination of wit, intelligence, and passion, it would unlock an agent's heart (and phone) and convince her/him to represent me. I used the same overbearing process for the SAT and GMAT and that had worked decently well. But looking back now, although this approach helped me hone my pitch, I probably could have achieved the same goal in half the time, with half as many drafts.

So my advice to anyone going through this process now is:

• Read a maximum of two short books and three articles on the subject. Companies will always try to tell you to read more, but...hey...that's because they're often trying to sell you more books on this topic. Unfortunately, writers are kinda suckers on anything that can help us get an agent or a publisher, because quite often we're desperate to get one!
  
• Write up to ten drafts, but no less than five distinctly different ones
• Get them out as fast as possible. You're going to be waiting a long time for agents to write back. So, you might as well rush to the wait.

As far as what to put in a query letter, I have had the most success with the following guidance from the material I've read as well as my own experiments:

• Be Natural: Make the tone of the letter casual, like you are talking to a friend. Think about how many letters agents and publishers get addressed to "Dear Sir". They probably read more letters than Stanford admission officers, most from people with formal offers for the next Harry Potter (riiiiight) that they have to "BUY NOW!". Skip all that hype and standoffish hoopla. Just write your idea down on paper as you would write a friend. That alone will distinguish you.
• Be Concise: If you hear one thing about agents, it's that they have no time. Don't add to the burden; reduce it. Try to make your letter shorter than one page. Use this straight-forward template:
• Open with a simple statement you are looking for representation for your completed manuscript. (If it's not completed, you shouldn't be writing.)
• Specify in the first two sentences the genre and the title.
• Use the first paragraph to summarize the plot. Give the whole plot, including the ending. Agents aren't your readers. They don't care about spoilers. They want to know how the whole story flows before they can judge if it's even worth reading.
• Use the second paragraph to list your qualifications. Do you have subject matter expertise? What have you written before? If you don't have any writing credentials, get some. Write anywhere third-parties will let you. Publish an article for your local newspaper. Do book reviews. Just get your name and your unique voice out there. Then list is in this paragraph as a qualification, within reason. Don't just list a bunch of self-published drivel no one reads.
• Wrap-up with a short statement about why you are soliciting this particular agent or publisher. What authors that she/he represents do you like?
  

Even after going through this, I don't purport to be an expert. This is just what I've found works better than other query letters I've written. With my first query letter, I got further interest in my entire manuscript from Writers House, my top choice agency. Although I didn't end up obtaining representation there, I do think the fact they even responded with a personal note to my inquiry showed my query letter had achieved a certain level. I'll include my query letter here soon. Best of luck with yours!

Kalamazoo!



Christopher

The Final Postcards

Rudy did an excellent job on the return postcard for my query letters to agents. After the conceptual work he did nailing Professor Goodspeed's look, he came up with the final two designs to the left.

After doing an informal poll, it seems like most people I know like both equally. Personally, I prefer the first because it captures Professor Goodspeed's affable nature better, but the sheer detail in the second also draws me in. In fact, the second presents a very powerful environmental scene. I mean, just look at that moon!

However, I want an accurate portrayal of the characters to drive interest in my book. Quite often, it is interesting characters that suck us into new stories. So, since the first is closer to Grandfather Goodspeed, I chose to use that.

The next step is to make the postcard as user-friendly as possible. I had Vistaprint produce a bunch of blank, postcard-size prints with Concept 1 on the front. I am generally not a huge fan of Vistaprint, since I have had a couple of disappointing experiences printing business cards through them. But I figured they couldn't ruin something as simple as this, and they actually did do a nice job and it was inexpensive.

I created a template in PowerPoint for the back copy, attached to the right. It is written from the agent's point of view, since they are the ones returning this postcard. Of course, postage will be affixed as well on the top right.

Overall, I think this is superior to the standard SASE (self-addressed stamped envelop) since it ties into the imagery of the book and even easier for agents to respond since all they need to do is check a box (like those notes in grade school, huh?)

Kalamazoo!



Christopher