This event originally aired on February 2, 2019 at 11:00am EST.
After five years as a literary agent, behind the scenes publisher experience, and almost a decade working directly with thousands of writers, Mary Kole is spilling the deets on how you can gear up for a successful manuscript submission to literary agents or publishers. In this short but jam-packed class, you’ll discover why research is so important, some resources to help you, the top five mistakes that crop up in the slush pile, and what agents and publishing house editors are really looking for. If you’re gearing up to submit, or even if you’re still writing, you’ll want to know this powerful information from an insider’s perspective.
Mary Kole was a literary agent at Andrea Brown Literary Agency and Movable Type Management for five years. She sold children’s book projects to all the major houses and has read tens of thousands of queries. Before that, she interned at Chronicle Books and earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of San Francisco. She has been writing craft and publishing articles at Kidlit.com since 2009, and published her reference book on crafting middle grade and young adult, Writing Irresistible Kidlit. She lived in the heart of the publishing industry, Brooklyn, NY for three years, and now calls Minneapolis, MN home. Her favorite part of working in publishing has always been digging into manuscripts, and she offers freelance editorial and consulting services to aspiring writers. You can find out more about her on kidlit.com or marykole.com.
How do you know whether to keep going on queries when you’re getting rejected without much feedback? I was getting requests and then took a break to revise based on an agent’s comments and now the same query is not doing as well.
I am struggling with deciding on how much is too much for a query. I’ve seen queries that give away almost entire plot lines and others that seem sparse and leave the reader wanting to know more. Do you have any tips on how to give enough information to an agent without going overboard?
I’ve seen queries that give away almost entire plot lines and others that seem sparse and leave the reader wanting to know more. Do you have any tips on how to give enough information to an agent without going overboard?
1. Any tips for staying sane while on submission, aside from working on something new? How often do you like to hear from your agent?
2. How can writers mentally shift from querying to the subs process, especially after having received so many rejections? How does one start to believe in their story again, once agented?
For the queries session, which steps would you require following to write a query. Also, should you include your pitch in the query, or should you use the pitch as a starting point to grow from?
If the main concept on your manuscript is too difficult to explain in a query letter, is it better to leave that part out of the query and focus on something else? I know unique concepts are easy ways to grab an agents attention, but what if the concept is kinda hard to explain on one or two sentences?
If an agency is a “no” from one means “no” from all and you’ve been rejected by one…should you not query a different agent from that agency if they request your query from a pitch contest?
I’m ready to query a manuscript written in rhyme which has won a contest. All of my other polished manuscripts are in prose. Should I mention this in my query? (That I normally write in prose?) Do agents want to see/know we can do a variety of things up front?
The lower MG age range and the chapter book age range seem to have a lot of overlap. If you have a book that falls into that overlap, do you have any advice on the best way to query to agents?
WOW!! Soooo much information! Absolutely LOVED this presentation! Mary does a fantastic job of making the query letter writing process clear and concise (as our query letters should be).
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