It Takes a Village...

...to crit a manuscript.

Okay, maybe not a whole village. But Roni over at Fiction Groupie has posted the first of what will hopefully be a series of excerpts for what she's calling "The Beta Club".

It's here! Today is the debut of the new critique feature here on Fiction Groupie. Every Tuesday and Thursday for the next few weeks, I will be posting a critique of a 750 word excerpt submitted to me by one of you generous (and brave) writers out there. To those of you who have already volunteered, thank you so much in advance. I hope everyone will find this to be a fun and helpful exercise to go through together.

Doesn't that sound like fun?

Of course it does! And the best part is, working out your critique muscles only makes you a better writer. And we could all use a little help in that department, am I right? ;) Support your colleagues and give them the feedback they've been craving.

So get on over to Roni's and check out Submission 1- The Dying Sun

Hope to see you there!

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!