File it Under “Whoops”

I made a lot of mistakes when I queried my first novel (you’ll notice that I never drew interest in it; there’s a reason). A lot of it was inexperience, along with a dash of ignorance. I didn’t know how to write a query well (okay, whether I can do it now is still up for debate), I didn’t understand what really went into a novel, and I thought my idea was AWESOME. Needless to say, it was not.

I wish I could find an old copy of that query to post on here as a warning. But I’ll have to settle with telling you of my journey from that to…wherever I am now (I’m honestly not quite sure : ).

When I first tried to write a query, I pretty much typed “query” in a search engine and looked at the result. I’m probably lucky that AgentQuery is so far up the search list. While its advice didn’t exactly leave me with an unputdownable letter, it did help. More importantly, it gave me a list of agents, many of whom were online with their own query advice.

But that was only the first step. I also learned a lot from all the bloggers I’ve met here. There have been query contests, query critiques, and nice people willing to tell me why my letter doesn’t work.

This is where I am now. Does that mean this is the end? Far from it! There’s still a long way to go, but thankfully, there are many other tools to get me there. There are conferences, critique sites, and many other people and places to learn from. The journey to that place where your query is accepted? It never ends.