Calling All Urban Fantasy and Romance...

Get those manuscripts ready, because Query Tracker is about to have their next contest!

Be one of the first fifty on Monday morning, 9am eastern to enter your first two pages and a one paragraph blurb about your novel to the form on Query Tracker's main site:

The submission form will go live at 9 AM EST, and only the first 50 entries will be accepted. So get your one-paragraph blurb ready. And your first two pages. Ms.Emmanuelle Alspaugh at Judith Erlich Literary Management will be requesting material from the contest entries.

Ms. Alspaugh represents Danielle Younge-Ullman (Falling Under), Alissa Johnson (As Luck Would Have It), Jenny Brown (Lord Lightning), Marcella Burnard (Enemy Within), Laurie London (Bonded by Blood), Christina Phillips (His Forbidden Princess), and Jordan LaRousse and Samantha Sade (Oysters and Chocolate). Her nonfiction authors include food writer and memoirist Adrienne Kane (Cooking and Screaming), family therapist Catherine McCall (When the Piano Stops), and Marie Claire editor Sarah Wexler (Living Large).

Though she also represents women’s fiction, historical fiction, and young adult fiction, the only genres that will be accepted in this current contest are romance and urban fantasy.

Need help writing your blurb? Head on over to Writer's Relief Blog for some helpful tips.

Good luck to everyone who enters!

WIP Wednesday : Crafting the Query

Okay, so I'm still revising Mara's story. And it STILL doesn't have a title. But I'm working on my query already. I sweat over my queries, researching and planning, and cutting and pasting and offering them up for the slaughter on forums like Query Tracker or Absolute Write. Maybe query-writing seems like a necessary evil, but I like to write a query as I'm revising just to make sure I'm on the right track.

So what is the right choice when it comes to query crafting? I've written queries that read like a synopsis, or like jacket copy, and others that are more evocative than tell about the actual plot. I've written queries of all kinds. I even tried to use Query Tracker to see which of my queries got the most requests. I wish I could tell you that one worked the best, but my results don't show any determinable pattern. Some liked the informative query, others the evocative, and still others responded favorably to the original, three-paragraph pitch query, making it 5! paragraphs all together.

Which just goes to show you how subjective (yes, I used the "S" word!) the decision to request pages is. And if you've done the amount of insanity-inducing research I've done, you'll note that many agents want something different in their query guidelines.

My request rate for the first fifty-three queries for EVANGELINE went as follows:

	53	Sent
	4	Still Out
	9	Partial Requests
	3	Full Requests
	28	Rejections
	9	Closed / No Response

And note that all 3 full requests were based on just the query. I have yet to have an agent request a full off a partial. You can make yourself nuts trying to tailor your query to each agent, but just remember that in the end, it's the pages that make the difference.

So make those pages shine!