Short;
To the point.
I could have spent a lot longer composing this letter --- I could have included a better hook, and included the book's blurb. At the time I sent it out however, I didn’t have the time to spend on revisions. I'm including this plain-vanilla, so-so query letter here for a reason. That is --- and I've found this to be true in 25 years of writing --- it's important that you SHOW UP. In other words, while you might want each piece of writing you send out to be perfect, or at least brilliant, sometimes you don’t have the time. At those times, send it out anyway.
Get into the habit of treating your work with a certain amount of aplomb. That is, even thought it's not perfect, and you could make it better if you had the time and energy, 90 per cent of the time what matters is that you send out your work. If you're a closet perfectionist, as I am, this will be hard for you at first.
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XXX
XXX
[DATE]
Dear XX
My name is Angela Booth. I'm seeking representation for my book: 7 Days To Easy-Money--- Copywriting Success.
The book is aimed at writers who would like to make money by copywriting (writing for business). As a copywriter, writers write the words that sell: everyday words. The words on ads, leaflets, brochures, press releases, product instructions and labels, newsletters, direct mail, and on Web sites.
I've been selling the material as an ebook and as an e-course on my Web site
(http://www.digital-e.biz/ ) for several months. It has been well received, and now I'd like to take the material and use it as the basis for a book.
Although there are several popular books on copywriting, none approach the material in a step-by-step fashion. My book's constructed so that at the end of seven days and seven lessons, the reader has built a viable freelance copywriting business.
My credentials for writing the book: I've been both a successful copywriter and writer for over 25 years. I've included a brief bio below.
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Please let me know if you'd like to see a proposal for the book.
Sincerely
Angela Booth
Bio:
Australian author and journalist Angela Booth writes about business, technology, women's issues, and creativity. Her books include: LifeTime: Better Time
Management in 21 Days, Home Sweet Office: Your Home Office, Improve Your
Memory in 21 Days, and Making the Internet Work for Your Business. Her feature articles have appeared in The Australian Women's Weekly, Woman's Day, New Idea, Vogue, and numerous other print and online magazines.
~~Angela Booth partial list of credits~~
A professional writer for 25 years, her credits include:
* Feature articles for mass market women's magazines in Australia and the US, including The Australian Women's Weekly, Woman's Day, New Idea and Vogue;
* Feature articles for computer magazines;
* Content work for Web sites and Internet newsletters, including the Internet Business Forum (http://ibizhome.com/)
* Business books for major publishers, including many books in Prentice Hall's WorkWise series (translated into several Asian and European languages);
* A series of romance novels for Macdonald Futura UK.
At her Digital-e --- Info to Go Web site (http://www.digital-e.biz/), Angela Booth publishers three popular ezines: Creative Small Biz and Your EveryDay Write, which
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are free to subscribers, and Freelance Copy Write, which has paying subscribers. She also teaches online writing courses.
Another sample query letter
Here's another sample query letter. At the time of writing, I haven't sent out this letter.
Again however, you can see that it's short, to the point, and contains nothing irrelevant. Over the years, I've found that whether I'm pitching (selling) nonfiction or fiction, I've had the best responses to letters which were less than one page in length.
Remember that nothing is set in stone. It's all an experiment. Write your letter at whatever length seems best to you. Your motto should be: "whatever works".
XXXX
XXXX
[DATE]
Dear XX
My name is Angela Booth. I'm seeking representation for my book: Writing To Sell In the Internet Age. The target audience is writers, and aspiring writers, who want to be paid for their skill with words.
Writing To Sell In the Internet Age discusses the new earning power that Internet technology gives writers. Many writers are comfortable using the Internet for email and research, but most are unaware that they now have many new opportunities, including:
Clever new ways to market their work and services with tools like
autoresponders, email mini-courses, ebooks, and promotional ezines;
The opportunity to develop a loyal following of readers. They can write and publish instantly, to a worldwide audience millions strong, with tools like Web logs (blogs);
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The ability to target specific niches, and to garner an income much faster than they can via traditional publishing routes. A writer can write an ebook or
report this month, and sell it forever.
I've been selling this material as an ebook and as an e-course on my Web site
(http://www.digital-e.biz/ ) for several months. It has been well received, and now I'd like to take the material and use it as the basis for a book.
My credentials for writing the book: I've been an author, writer and copywriter over 25 years. I've been online since 1993, and know the online world well. (I've included a brief bio below.)
As far as I'm aware, there's no other book currently on the market which presents this material. The few Internet-related books for writers currently available came out around 2000, during the height of the dot com boom, and focus on online markets for writers.
Please let me know if you'd like to see a proposal for the book.
Sincerely
Angela Booth
Write your query letter!
The next step is to write your own query letter. Don’t take too long over this. Make a couple of notes of points you want to include, and write it. You can include your blurb
--- your blurb could in fact make up the bulk of your letter.
Here's a quick outline for your letter:
A. Introduce yourself in 20 words or less, and state your business --- "I'm seeking representation for my book: [title]…"
B. Blurb.
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C. Your credentials.
D. Identify the market for the book.
"Don'ts" for your query letter
1. Don't make unsupported claims for yourself or your book
Please don't say that you're successful or that you've written a bestseller. Only beginning writers make claims like this. The agent or editor will immediately classify you as a novice, and an irritating one at that.
(On the other hand, if a well-known much-published writer has praised you or
your book, say so, and give his/ her contact details so that the editor can call him/
her.)
2. Don't mention that you're unpublished
The agent will figure it out when you don’t mention writing credits. Please note: THIS IS NOT A BAD THING. Everyone has to start somewhere. Editors and agents
know this, and they won’t hold it against you. They will judge your book proposal query on its merits. If an agent feels that your material is something that she can sell, she will contact you. As will an editor, if she feels that the writing in your query letter is to the point and professional, and she thinks that your book idea is a good one.
3. Don't mention that your partner, your best friend, or the milkman think that you’re a good writer or that you've got a brilliant idea for a book
Unless these people have publishing credits, no one cares. Mentioning them marks you not only as an amateur, but also as someone who may be difficult to work with.
What do I mean by "difficult to work with"? Before you sign a contract, your agent and editor will judge your behaviour, looking for tell-tale signs that you might be a problem writer.
Problem writers:
o Argue when asked to rewrite. Almost everything you write will
need to be rewritten. Your agent will ask you to add, delete or
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revise material in your proposal. Your editor will ask for
rewrites on your book, and perhaps more than one rewrite.
Therefore, if you show any sign that you may drag your feet
over these chores, or do them without a song on your lips, they
will dump you. Life's too short, and publishing is too
competitive to indulge anyone's temperament;
o Procrastinate. Publishing is always on a tight deadline. From
the day of your first contact, you must show that you can work
to deadline.
o Can't follow instructions. Never be afraid to ask if there is
something you don’t understand. For example, if you're asked
for a "bio" and you don’t know how to write one, ask. No one
will think less of you for asking, but they will take several steps
backward if you don’t follow instructions, or if you decide that
you will do things your way.
o Turn in a messy or less-than-pristine typescript. Or fail to send
an electronic file when asked.
4. Don't be specific
Many writers are never asked for a proposal because they don’t nail the query letter. If you tell an agent your book is about "growing up in the fifties", the agent will simply ignore you. This is not specific enough. You must be totally specific, so that the person you're writing to can visualise the book, and can also visualise where it will fit into the marketplace.
Writers do this sort of thing because they're insecure. They imagine that if
they're vague, the agent will ask to see their book because they want to know exactly what it's about. This is a HUGE mistake. Agents and editors receive hundreds of letters and proposals each week. If you're not specific, you give the impression that you haven’t thought out your proposal.
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Day Six: Write the proposal
Day Six Task
Task One: Write the initial draft of your book proposal
Write the draft quickly. Don’t think too much about it. In your initial draft, you aim for quantity, rather than quality.
Relax! You'll write your draft in stages
Today's the big day. You're going to write your book proposal. If you're starting to freeze up at the thought, relax. You've already done a lot of preparation work, and you're not going to write it all at once. You'll write it by taking the proposal through several clearly defined stages:
A. First draft. This is your "thinking" draft, in which you think on paper. In this draft, you write whatever you like. You're aiming for quantity here, rather than quality. Write this draft full-steam ahead, without stopping to look things up.
Consider "writing" this draft by talking into a tape recorder.
If you need to do some spot research, just leave a note to yourself, and keep working on the draft. You can look up individual items later. The benefit of doing specific research later is that you may find it's unnecessary. It's quite possible that you'll eliminate this material from a later draft.
B. Your second draft. Your first draft has shown you what you want to say. In this draft, you have a crack at saying it. In your second draft, you organize. You decide what material you want to include, and perhaps expand on, and what material you'll delete. Think of this draft as shaping your material.
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Occasionally you'll want to take this shaping draft through several documents.
You may have a B1, B2, B3 and B4 version, for example.
Keep your drafts.
Use the "File, Save As" menu option of your word processor to keep versions of
your book proposal. When you change the name of the file as you work through
different versions, it means that you can always go back and reinsert something
that you deleted, because it's in a previous version.
C. Your clean-up draft. Your final draft. You've said what you want to say, now you get a chance to say it better. You clean up the redundancies and spice it up.
Paradoxically, the easiest way to write well is to allow yourself to write badly. Every day. This is because writing is hard when you try to think and write at the same time.
Allow yourself to think on paper for as many drafts as you need. Then write the final draft with confidence.
Woody Allen once said that 90 per cent of success at anything was just
showing up. I've found that that's very true. So no matter how bad you feel your writing is at any given time, go ahead anyway. Your writing is not as bad as you think, it's simply a crisis of confidence, and even if it is rough when you first get it on the computer screen, it can be fixed. However, if you hesitate, and don’t get it on the computer screen, you have nothing to fix. Get it done!
At the end of this book, in the Appendix, you'll find the complete proposal for my book 7 Days To Easy Money: Copywriting Success. This is a real proposal, and it won an agent contract on first reading. Read it through so that you can see exactly what goes into creating a proposal.
We've already covered what your proposal must contain, here it is again, for
reference. Please print this page out:
A title page, with the title, subtitle, author, word count of the completed book, and estimated time frame for completion. You might state: "75,000 words, completion three months after agreement".
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An overview: a description of the book. This can be as short as a paragraph, or several pages long.
The background of the author. Your biography, as it relates to your expertise for this book.
The competition in the marketplace. This is where you mention the top four or five titles which are your book's competitors. (Note: if there are dozens of
competitors for your book, this is a good thing, because it means that the
subject area is popular. Your book will need to take a new slant.)
Promotions. This is where you describe how you will promote your book, both before and after publication.
A chapter outline.
A sample chapter, or two chapters. This is always the first chapter, and if you're sending two chapters, it's the Introduction and Chapter One, or if there's no Introduction, it's Chapters One and Two.
Attachments. Optional. You may want to attach articles you've written about the book's topic, or any relevant supporting material.
Let's write the proposal
Your chapter outline
You've already been working on a major part of the proposal --- the chapter outline. If you like, you can begin today's work by spending an hour or two with that. If your chapter outline still has major holes in it, don't worry too much about it. Today we'll complete an initial draft of the complete proposal, and you can fill in the gaps later.
Your background—why you're the person to write this book
Next, we'll work on the background section.
The first piece of info you'll need to include in the background section is a brief bio. Every book you own has a bio of the author, so take a few books off your shelves and study the author bios. Most are short. Novelists' bios mention the writer's
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interests, partner, children and pets. The bios of nonfiction writers (that's you) emphasize the writer's academic credentials if it's important to the writer's credibility, or the writer's experience in the field the book covers, or anything else which might be relevant.
Here's an example of a bio, which I wrote as part of the book proposal for: 7
Days To Easy Money: Copywriting Success--
Quick Bio
Australian author and journalist Angela Booth has been writing successfully for 25
years. She writes about business, technology, women's issues, and creativity. Her books include: LifeTime: Better Time Management in 21 Days, Home Sweet Office: Your Home Office, Improve Your Memory in 21 Days, and Making the Internet Work for Your Business. Her feature articles have appeared in magazines like Energy for Women, The Australian Women's Weekly, Woman's Day, New Idea, Vogue, and
numerous other print and online magazines.
She's also a working copywriter, writing copy for businesses ranging from
international corporations to small businesses with less than five employees.
Your bio must be slanted so that it relates to those experiences which make you the perfect person to write the book you're proposing. For example, let's say that in your daily life you're a doctor. The book you're proposing is a gardening book: how to grow your own organic vegetables. In your bio, might call yourself "Dr. Jane Smith", but for this bio, you’d mention that you grew up on a farm, have grown organic vegetables for ten years, and write a monthly column for Eat Your Organic Veggies Magazine. Your experiences as a doctor wouldn’t be appropriate for this book. On the other hand (just to confuse you), if you intended to cover the health and nutritional benefits of organic vegetables at great length, then your credentials as a doctor would be important, and you'd include them.
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Please remember that there is no way you can do any of this wrong --- something
either works, or it doesn't. You can always make changes later, when you get
feedback .
Many of my writing students focus so much on the "correct" way of doing something, that they never get anything done. Join any writing group, and discussions of correct formatting abound. If you start to get nervous about anything you're doing, wondering whether you're doing it "right", simply tell yourself: "this is the way I choose to do it.
I may choose another way at some other time, but right now, I do it this way, and it's the right way for me."
In addition to your bio, if you have publishing credits you'll want to mention them here. Your publishing credits should be paid credits, rather than work you've done for promotional purposes, or material for which you weren't paid.
What if you don’t have any publishing credits? Everyone has to start
somewhere. If you don’t have any credits, don’t worry about them. If your proposal is excellent, and a publisher wants to commission the book, then your lack of credits won’t count against you.
Write the Overview
Now you'll know why you spent time writing your blurb. The Overview, the
description of your book, is the first part of your proposal that agents and publishers will read. It's your book in a nutshell. It's also merely an expanded version of your blurb.
I've included a sample Overview below. It's from the proposal for my book
Writing To Sell In The Internet Age.
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Sample Overview Writing To Sell In The Internet Age
The Internet gives writers unlimited new opportunities
Writing To Sell In The Internet Age empowers writers by revealing the immense new earning power that Internet technology gives them. While many writers are
comfortable using the Internet for email and research, most are unaware that they now have many new opportunities, including:
Clever new ways to market their work and services with tools like
autoresponders, email mini-courses, ebooks, auctions, and promotional ezines;
The opportunity to develop a loyal following of readers. They can write and publish instantly, to a worldwide audience millions strong, with tools like Web logs (blogs). This loyal following makes a writer more appealing to traditional publishers;
The ability to target specific niches, and to garner an income much more
quickly than they can via traditional publishing routes. A writer can write an ebook or report this month, and sell it forever.
The Internet gives writers the power to be their own publisher and distributor by selling their work directly to readers. Many writers are already taking advantage of the possibilities. Judy Cullins, who's building an online reputation as "The Book Coach", says of selling her ebooks online directly to readers: "The first months, I had no idea at the time how powerful this method was. My income bolted to over $3000 a month in less than a year."
The new rule for writers in the Internet age is: "Create, promote, sell". What's amazing is that writers can do all this in one day, even in hours. When I write a report, I can format it in PDF (Portable Document Format) at the click of a key. That's the publishing done. I can then add the report to the online store at my Web site in minutes --- distribution done. Then I can send an announcement out to my subscribers (promotion done) and watch the sales rolling in. Best of all I don't have to be
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anywhere in particular to do this. I can do it as easily on a sun-drenched beach on the Great Barrier Reef off northern Australia as I can in my home office in Sydney.
Are these capabilities within the reach of non-technically-inclined writers?
Yes! Although I've been writing about software, computers and the Internet for many years, I'm by no means a geek. The writers who shared their anecdotes and success stories for this book aren't geeks either. They're writers who've seen opportunities and grabbed at them. Many of these writer/ publisher/ entrepreneurs didn’t come to writing via