Nathan Bransford - The Forums

Hello to all, Thankfully, or luckily, or both, my agent was able to rustle up interest for my MG (middle-grade) manuscript with some pretty reputable houses, which really exceeded my expectations. It was beyond exciting. Excitement fades once you realize you're not the lucky few who get those awesom...

a typical 'concise' query is 250 words or less...i would say that you should really expand on the details. It has to sound enticing like the back of a book at a bookstore...right now it sounds like an idea tossed around but not fully developed..

haha thanks! This site has been an amazing resource! It seems like i finally have a usable query...alas... I wish i discovered this a loooong time ago haha. Would've saved me a lot of rejections! based on your questions...does it affect the query if it isnt clear the mercenaries are human? they are,...

thanks fersnerfer! Yea, ms word kept auto correcting the or to 'and' for some reason...I thought or sounded better myself. Is this better? Aaren Danielson is a teenaged martial arts student whose life gets seriously screwed up when his adoptive parents drop a bombshell. His biological parents aren’t...

thanks for the input! My query has come a long way with the help of posters on this site!

This is the newest version, with some modifications made based on previous comments. Let me know if there's anything else that sticks out as not really flowing in this one. Aaren Danielson is a teenaged martial arts student whose life gets seriously screwed up when his adoptive parents drop a bombsh...

Boston Lager? Haha! See how this works for you...i tried to give it more 'voice'. Dear Agent, Aaren’s life as a high school outcaste sucks, but things get seriously screwed up when Hank and Eunice Danielson drop a bombshell. His biological parents aren’t dead. They gave him away for his own safety, ...

thanks whipslip! I shouldn't be home with a samuel adams in my hand, redoing queries on a saturday night haha. Lets see if the improvements work! I wanted to avoid using supernatural evil in the query so i tried to personify the evil. I think it works but may its better to not give the name... Dear ...

Where to start... 1. Too long. Think about the back cover of a James Patterson novel. Its short and too the point. Back covers can sell a book in 150 words or less. At least with a query you have a little more leeway, BUT less is more in this instance. Since you're dealing with and adult book, the e...

thanks to everyone for their input...i've taken all the suggestions and made a hodgepodge of the best of everything that was suggested to me and came up with this 252 word query which I really like. Please let me know if anything seems off about this one, and or you want me to graft something from a...

I dunno its still a little bland. Would a 15 yr old kid read that and want to buy it? Thats really how agents look at queries in my opinion. Does the query speak to its target market in the right voice. Maybe try out the query on a relative who is in the market you want to target. It definitely help...

i like the concept, but this definitely needs to be reworked. First off the italicized part..you need to either remove it or make it the tagline, but in it's current form its not necessarily the best idea...i'm just not sure an agent would react well to it, as finicky as many are. Also, don't mentio...

The premise seems interesting, but you're suffering from the same problem i did, of trying to condense your great idea into 250 words or less. Now i understand why they say to write the query before the book. Doing the reverse is like trying to put a grown baby back in the womb and its no easy feat....

good point cmo. yea i think i'll try to gloss over the adoption since its not what makes the book unique/exciting. Its more the emotional angst type stuff. I purposefully didnt read any harry potter just so i didnt borrow any elements from it. I did watch the movies and the adoption there wasn't as ...

thanks for the feedback cmo. I wondered if maybe it did sound a too dark. I just wanted to make sure it sounds as anti-harry potter as possible, since despite my book contains not a single element from that series, anything that faintly reminds an agent of it might get a no nowadays. How do these ch...