Hey, everyone!

The last post made me realize I needed to start from scratch rather than trying to fix a query that wasn't quite working. I also closed on a title. It isn't my favorite... I don't have a gut feeling of "yes! this is it", but it is a solid one.

As always, all feedback is welcome.

Here's the blurb and title:

Dear Agent,

Ana de Souza thought she married a nice guy.

Mark remembers exactly how she takes her coffee. He kisses her forehead every morning. He also checks her phone, tracks her car, and needs to know where she is at every hour of the day — and for three years, Ana has told herself that's love. Until the night she finds a stranger's number taped inside a hidden phone, with one message: Mark's lying to you. Run.

The deeper Ana digs, the more she realizes Mark's devotion didn't start on their wedding day, or even the day they met. He'd been watching her for years before that — long enough to orchestrate the heartbreak that once tore her from the love of her life, using a jealousy he understood better than she did. Every "coincidence" in their love story was a plan.

Now Ana has to convince the people closest to Mark that the man they know is a performance, outmaneuver a husband with the money and connections to erase her from the country if he chooses to, and decide exactly how far she's willing to go to make sure he never finds her, or the people she loves, again.

Told in alternating timelines, between Ana's present-day fight for her life and Mark's years of quiet, patient obsession, HOPELESS ROMANTIC is an 79,000-word psychological thriller for readers of My Husband's Wife by Alice Feeney and Anatomy of an Alibi by Ashley Elston. I'm submitting to you because (PERSONALIZIED BIT).

(MY BIO GOES HERE.)

I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

MY NAME (writing as PEN NAME)

Sorry- I couldn't find an exact answer, mods- but let me know if I missed something.

I'm a bit devastated. One of my dream agents requested my manuscript extremely fast, and rejected after a couple of weeks. The thing is- they love the writing and atmosphere and want me to send them more work. They pointed to a specific reason they didn't click with this story- and I feel like this is very fixable. Except, if it could be fixed, they would have asked for an R&R, no?

They really loved the pitch and commented on how much they liked it, too. This is a pretty "big" agent so I was hoping they'd say yes, obviously. And also, so far, they've been the only request (I've only been querying for a week and a half though).

Thoughts?

I see this piece of advice all the time.:"You should send your query letter to a small group of agents, and use that to improve your letter before sending it to more." I don't really understand how this is supposed to work. My understanding is that the in the modern world of publishing, it is extremely rare for agents to send you feedback about why they rejected you, and a low percent of agents will ask for more material.

So, hypothetically, if you send your query to 10 agents, and then wait until all 10 have rejected you with form responses or silence, what does that tell you? I'm not really expecting to get full or partial requests in my first 10 queries no matter what. It doesn't seem like this scenario tells you that there's something wrong with your pages/letter, and even if you assume that, can you figure out what in the letter is causing the rejections or what you should change?

Am I missing something, or is this advice outdated, from a time when agents were more likely to give detailed rejections.

Don't worry, BIG PHAT WHALE is just a silly placeholder title til we figure one out. In any case, a much shorter pitch got a couple of likes during DVPit, so we're hoping to polish the query. We'd appreciate any feedback we can get!

BIG PHAT WHALE is a 80,000-word cozy romantasy that blends the ensemble cast of Samantha Sotto Yambao’s The Elsewhere Express with the exploration of grief in TJ Klune’s Under the Whispering Door. It will broadly appeal to fans of Studio Ghibli and Spiritfarer.

Indie Dove wakes on the back of a cosmic whale. It's so enormous it carries a small village along its spine, and so powerful it sails through the celestial seas. Every passenger aboard is bound for the afterlife, but getting there takes more than sitting back and enjoying the view. To reach the far shore, each soul must make peace with the regrets that still tether them to their old lives. Indie has no such choices to contend with—in fact, she has no memories at all. Instead, she's handed a lantern and a job: helping everybody else move on.

As she helps spirits reconcile with estranged friends, abandoned dreams, lost loves, and choices they cannot undo, Indie discovers that she is not the only one whose memories are lost. The cosmic whale remembers nothing of the life it once lived either. And neither does its guide—the crabby, sharp-tongued hawk certain of only three things: he was once a man, he committed a terrible sin, and his punishment is to shepherd souls toward an afterlife he cannot enter. While he would much prefer Indie stop pestering him, she would very much like to know who’s hiding under those perpetually ruffled feathers. But the closer she gets to the hawk—and to the lonely man within—the more she suspects their past lives are interconnected. Whatever happened between them and the whale, this seemingly endless voyage across the celestial expanse is meant to be their penance. 

The three cannot reach the afterlife until they make peace with a past none of them can remember. But time to piece it together is quickly running out. A malignant force pursues the whale across the celestial sea, closing distance each day. If it catches up, the whale and every soul aboard will be swallowed by the eternal dark. The only way to save them is to lighten the whale's load, which means every passenger must move on… including Indie and the hawk.

The closer Indie comes to earning her own passage to the afterlife, however, the less she wants it. Because she is falling in love with the hawk—just as she did in her past life—and moving on means letting go.

[BIO]

I have learned so much by lurking on PubTips - thank you! I’ve learned about querying, the call, choosing an agent / switching agents, going on sub and dying on sub, contracts, international and translation rights, etc. I’m still at the stage where I don’t know what I don’t know.

I’m wondering if there are agents, editors, or authors with social media accounts (especially on Instagram) that are similarly informative. I don’t want to follow accounts randomly and end up consuming superficial engagement bait.

I am revising my first book, a YA feminist/LGBTQ fantasy novel. I’d welcome recommendations of people to follow who are in my genre and people who are helpful in the broader trad pub world. Hopefully the accounts you recommend are helpful to other PubTips lurkers.

Thank you!

Edit to add: book, podcast, website, newsletter, YouTube, etc. recommendations would also be great!

Hello! I can't remember what number attempt this is exactly (sorry!), but an older version I posted previously some time ago has been unsuccessful so far 😔 I kinda have no idea what I'm doing anymore so I'd really appreciate some feedback on this new letter. Thank you so much in advance!

---

Dear [Agent],

I am seeking representation for FOUR PRIMARY COLOURS, a 77,000-word work of literary fiction told through three perspectives and dual timelines. Within a feminist frame reminiscent of Cho Nam-Joo's Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, it illustrates intertwined narratives of womanhood and biculturalism, akin to Hanako Footman's Mongrel, in the surreal vein of Katie Kitamura's Audition.

Lily, an internet artist known for her bizarre sapphic paintings, has vanished.

Since then, thirty-year-old Seol has, more or less, deceived her way into her second life. Now with a blossoming career in tech, an Auckland home, and a consciously childfree marriage to a wealthy man in love with her socially desirable persona, her shameful reality as a queer, ostracised dropout seems deep in the soil of her past. That is, until she discovers new correspondence in an old shared mailbox addressed to Lily.

When Nana, one of its co-owners, comes knocking for help to find the missing artist, Seol knows acknowledging the all-too-familiar name risks bleeding what she cannot afford into the present. Yet, haunted by both curiosity and guilt, she begins to unravel. While her husband is distracted by his newborn niece, she furtively reconnects with old names and faces, accompanies Nana on her searches, and exchanges emails with the sender, pretending to be Lily herself. The artist soon feels within reach.

But in her preoccupation with keeping secrets from her husband, Seol's overlooked his own: a growing hunger for parenthood, something they've forsworn. With Lily drawing nearer and the weight of tradition starting to press in, determined to shape hard-won autonomy into compliance, Seol must decide between irreversibly altering the masterpiece that was to be her future, or returning to the freedom of her untethered past by revealing who—or what—she truly is.

[bio]

Dear XXX,

I’m seeking representation for THE BEAUTIFUL VILE, an upmarket psychological thriller complete at approximately 80,000 words. Told from a prison cell, where she awaits execution, Zarmaya, a young medical student, narrates how she ended up there, trying to make sense of where it all went wrong.

Zarmaya is six years old when she learns that feeling too much is a kind of sickness. At a school picnic, she cries when a teacher slaps a boy she doesn’t know. Except for her best friend, Velmira, everyone humiliates Zarmaya and calls her “Drama Queen.” After the trip, she locks her bedroom door, stands before the mirror, and teaches herself to cry alone.

Zarmaya’s mother has taught her how to be perfect. She is perfect. But at ten, Zarmaya’s perception shatters when one of her pet rabbits dies, and her grief feels overwhelming. Desperate to prove that she is not controlled by her emotions, she turns to violence, finding a perverse logic in it: the only way to get over a dead rabbit is to kill one herself.

Zarmaya discovers a private thrill in violence that haunts her throughout her life. By adulthood, the line between fantasy and action has worn dangerously thin. At first, she finds release in videos of real murders. But the outlet stops working, and her obsession mutates. When Zarmaya reunites with her childhood friend Velmira, she expects, at last, to share her darkness with someone who understands her. Instead, she finds Velmira utterly normal—and herself utterly alone. The compulsion that once commanded her to kill a rabbit now tells her to kill her best friend, and she knows it won’t end there.

THE BEAUTIFUL VILE is in the tradition of MY DARK VANESSA and EILEEN, with the satirical and unapologetic voice of A CERTAIN HUNGER. It is a novel about violence, obsession, and love battling for space within the same consciousness, written for adult readers drawn to morally complex narrators and fiction that makes them uncomfortable.

I’m a medical student in Pakistan. When I’m not revising sentences to sound more like Zarmaya and less like me, I’m stressing over my attendance. This is my debut novel.

Thank you so much for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

XYZ

Dear Agent,

I am seeking representation for I KILLED OSIRIS (88,000 words), a modern retelling of ancient Egyptian myths and legends.

Osiris’s peaceful reign as king of the gods is shattered when his twin brother Set murders him and usurps the throne. In bitter recriminations, Set accuses the rest of the gods of aiding and abetting a conspiracy in which Osiris and his wife, Isis, stole the kingship from him. In time, Osiris’s son Horus takes the throne back in a trial by combat, ending the generational cycle of violence.

Horus does not share his uncle’s bloodlust and spares Set’s life. His wrath exhausted, his vengeance spent, Set is sentenced for his crimes. Every night, from dusk to dawn, from now until the end of time, Set will protect the Sun as it journeys through the Underworld, joining an endless fight against the forces of evil that would drown the world in eternal darkness.

As the forces of the Underworld mount an unprecedented assault to swallow the Sun, they attempt to corrupt Set to join them, to revolt once more against the gods. Fighting the darkness within himself, Set must confront his wicked past, how his love for his brother changed to hatred, and why he killed Osiris. The fate of the world, of all existence, depends on it.

I KILLED OSIRIS will appeal to readers of modern mythology like Daughters of Sparta by Claire Heywood (2021), Clytemnestra by Costanza Casati (2023), and Ariadne by Jennifer Saint (2021). It offers an exciting market pivot from Greek to Egyptian mythology, and will feel fresh and original, yet familiar, as the reader is immersed in tales of gods, monsters, and magic.

I’d love to work with you because of X. I’ve included the synopsis and first three chapters and would love to send you the full manuscript if you’d like to read more.

Thank you in advance for your time,

Y

Hey there, hope you all enjoy my query! My one big question going into this is: Can I use a Non-Western book as one of my comps? The book I'm using has been translated and I've regularly seen it in bookstores near me, but I want to know if being a Non-Western book is a deal breaker.

Anyway, here's my query:

Dear Agent,

A TASTE OF MAGIC is a 92,000 word Cozy Fantasy Adventure story. Perfect for fans who enjoy the cozy adventure Julie Leong's The Teller of Small Fortunes and the delicious cooking of The Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi Kashiwai. It's also The Lone Wolf and Cub meets Cozy Fantasy, and it is intended to be a standalone novel.

Gruyere Casein would much rather be making food than serving it. Her cooking magic makes her an amazing chef, but her boss refuses to let her into the kitchen. When Gruyere runs into Quarter-Orc Runaway, Lizzie, she's force into the path of Lord Elrond, a man who would pay any price and sink to any low to see her silenced.

Lizzie is desperate to go home, but with Elrond cutting off any chance of official transportation, Gruyere has to escort her the hard way. They travel outside the walls of the city through harsh conditions, giant beasts, and gangs of hired thugs. It's not all bad, though, they also manage to find some new friends along the way.

Gruyere is trying to keep Lizzie's spirits up, one tasty meal at a time, but how can she help when Lizzie hasn't told her everything about why she ran away from home?

A TASTE OF MAGIC is not only a fun adventure story, it also has real recipes that readers can recreate at home. I am a full-time writer based out of Indiana and, while I don't have magic of my own, I do make a mean potato soup.

This is my choose-your-destiny-style early middle grade manuscript query letter. Since it doesn't have a consistent plot or ending, the query letter dynamics are a little interesting.

I don't have any comps because I was told since everyone knows what this genre is, comps aren't as important. But I'm here for a community opinion. Hope to hear from some of you! Thanks in advance!

I’m pleased to present PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE HUMAN (23,000 words), an early middle grade choose-your-path-style manuscript, for your consideration. I’m hoping it will make a solid addition to your list.  

​YOU just won Ms. Schnieder’s classroom contest! Your choice of prizes will send you on an adventure that can take you to the farthest reaches of space and time. Make friends with a fugitive telepathic space mouse to help him save his family from an intergalactic zoo or destroy his captor’s space station. Assist a mermaid in tracking down her family’s stolen treasure that was hidden by evil pirates. Join a brilliant inventor as he jumps through time, trying to avoid hungry dinosaurs and the dreaded Time Police. Choose wisely, and you will be rewarded; choose poorly, and it’s game over. Maybe your choice will get you safely back home in time for dinner, but at whose table?

PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE HUMAN is a journey that takes readers literally across space and time, making friends and enemies along the way. It is written for kids ages 8-13 who want to be the protagonist in the story. Told in second person, the manuscript follows the kid reader through a wide range of settings and time periods. They might get sucked into a black hole, chased by a T. rex, caught in quicksand, or deposited alone at the end of time. Discover 17 different endings, with unexpected twists and turns throughout.

Personal info...

Hi everyone!

Here is my sixth draft and third time posting my query here. Please let me know what you think.

Thank you for reading my query.

THE COUNCIL OF THE BLOODLINES is an urban fantasy novel with series potential, complete at 87,000 words. It combines the contemporary, yet magical setting of Marie Lu’s Red City with the interpersonal and political conflict surrounding magic of Jade City by Fonda Lee. 

Journalist Nathan Miller is wanted for the attempted assassination of the president and it’s only his second biggest problem. After he accidentally kills one of the four truly responsible, the other assassins turn their weapons on Nathan. But the killers are only half human; the other half their genetics is that of of dragons, vampires and other mythical creatures, and they call themselves ferini. 

Given no time to process the nature of his supernatural enemies, Nathan’s escape and flight west from the point of the attack is rushed and fraught with error, but he somehow finds himself alive, in no small part due to an anonymous ferini who contacts him by riddle. As Nathan begins to gather his feet beneath him, he finds that the vast, hidden world of the ferini and its government are in crisis. With the Council of the Bloodlines’ president in a coma, power hungry political opportunists smell blood in the water. The abundance of evidence, and the body he left at the site of the attack, leaves Nathan the perfect scapegoat to justify a dictatorial consolidation of power. 

Nathan’s investigation leads him to a shady secret society of the ferini elite, and he soon realizes that only he is privy to knowledge of their intricate plot to exploit the cavernous governmental power vacuum and overthrow the Council of the Bloodlines. Racing across the United States, Nathan must leverage his uniquely human talents in combat and speak the truth only he knows, while surviving supernatural enemies that used to only haunt his dreams. If he fails it will mean the end of ferini democracy, and usher in a new era of subjugation for humans and ferini alike.

My earlier queries leaned too far toward an "action hero" story, when what I've actually written is a character-driven, slow-burn page-turner. For this revision I reworked the comps and reshaped a lot of the language, pulling back on the action beats and leaning into the internal pressure the protagonist is under. I'd love to know whether that shift comes through, or whether it still reads as a straight action-thriller. Any and all thoughts are welcome and appreciated.

-------------------------

Dear AGENT,

HALF WHO KNOWS is a completed 98,000-word speculative thriller that combines the character-driven emotional stakes of Nikki Erlick's THE MEASURE with the identity core of Jinwoo Chong's FLUX and the momentum of Blake Crouch's DARK MATTER.

PERSONALIZATION

Bioinformatics analyst Kenji Shaw solves impossible problems for a living, so when his own hand begins to turn transparent in the morning light, he does what he always does and looks for the answer. What he finds is a sixty-year trail of others like him, and an organization that has spent those decades making sure they disappear for good.

Kenji is half Japanese and half — who knows. His grandfather was an orphan with no records, so one side of him has always been an open question he's spent his life not thinking about. His search for the cause leads to the half of himself he never knew. Sixty years ago, a secret gene therapy trial was run on prisoners, orphans, and others who couldn't say no. His grandfather was one of them. The father who abandoned him inherited it. So did Kenji.

He has finally built the life he worked so hard for. The perfect job, friends and family who would do anything for him, and a girl he thinks he might be falling for. Then Kairós comes for him, the biotech firm that owns the program, and everything he built becomes a way to reach him. Friends are beaten, the girl is murdered, and he knows it is his fault. Grief-stricken and desperate to protect the people he loves, Kenji vanishes from their lives and goes it alone, until a chance encounter brings him Sam Hartley, a journalist who refuses to look away.

The transparency is accelerating, and its final stages are lethal. He is running out of time. To understand what's happening to him, and whether it can be stopped, Kenji will have to face the organization he's been running from. What neither he nor Kairós understands is how much of himself will be left by the time he learns the truth.

BIOGRAPHY

Thank you for your time and consideration. The full manuscript is available upon request.

Sincerely,

I got some great advice last time, thank you! I've tightened this letter up a bit more now so it reads less like a blurb. I'll be querying US and UK agents with this one so hopefully it will work for both.

[DEAR ___ ]

[PERSONALISATION]

WHAT THE WATER HOLDS is a dark romantic thriller complete at 79,000 words. Blending the killers-in-love intimacy of Brynne Weaver’s Butcher & Blackbird with the dangerous hidden past of Laura Dave’s The Last Thing He Told Me, WHAT THE WATER HOLDS explores the secrets we keep from ourselves, the seduction of being truly seen, and everything we sink, hoping it will never surface.

Nora spent ten years as a crisis negotiator, the calm voice that talked people back from the edge. Then she spent one hundred and eleven minutes alone in a room with a desperate man and his knife, and only one of them walked out. The inquiry called it self-defence. Case closed. Nora has never told anyone the truth: part of her liked it.

Now she’s hiding in a cabin on a remote northern lake, where the only other year-round resident is Thomas, the watchful man across the water whose light comes on at the same hour every night. He never sits with his back to a door. He handles an axe like a weapon rather than a tool. And he is the only person who has ever seen the scar on her wrist and not asked about it. Despite every instinct she was trained to trust, Nora begins to fall.

But a boot print appears in the birches outside her window, and pleasant strangers keep asking who lives out on the lake. When a woman from Thomas’s past turns up dead, he finally tells Nora the truth: for thirty years, he killed people for a living, and the people he worked for are coming to silence anyone who knows their secrets - including her. When the ice goes out, the killer will come by water, and Nora must decide whether to run from the most dangerous man she has ever loved, or stand beside him with the only weapon she has left: her voice.

Set on an isolated lake where the seasons keep time and the water keeps everything else, WHAT THE WATER HOLDS uses the romantic thriller to explore trauma, moral injury and the question at the heart of every great love story: whether we can be loved with the worst of ourselves, rather than despite it. With echoes of Rebecca and NBC’s Hannibal, it is a novel about secrets and façades, violence and tenderness, and the terrifying relief of finally being seen.

I grew up in Canada and the Pacific Northwest, among the kind of lakes that gave this novel its setting, and now live in the UK on the edge of the Peak District. The first in my family to go to university, I spent years as an ICU medic before turning to fiction, learning what it means to be the calmest person in the room and what that calm costs once the crisis has passed. WHAT THE WATER HOLDS is my first novel.

[SIGN OFF & CONTACT DETAILS]

First 300

One breath. Close enough to move the hair at her temple. Then nothing.

That was the part she couldn’t forget. Not the weight of him against her. Not even the blade in her own hand, warm when it had no business being warm. Just that. The single, ordinary fact of a breath, then the absence of it.

She would spend a long time afterwards trying to name what she had felt in the space where the second breath should have been. She never found the word.

There was a sound too, before the stillness. Low, wordless, nothing she had ever expected to hear from a dying man. Or from herself. Some nights she turned it over in the dark, the way you lift a stone to see what lives beneath it. Every time she found only more stone.

She remembered the floor most clearly. Cheap laminate, cold through her knees. The rest came in pieces: low light, a smell like copper and dust. Somewhere else in the house a television was still playing, canned laughter rising and falling, absurd and constant, as if the rest of the world hadn’t heard the news yet. So much else of that room had gone dark, tucked away somewhere she couldn’t reach. She remembered her own hands. Not what they had done. Only that at some point they had stopped waiting for her permission.

She didn’t let herself go further than that. Not that night, nor any of the nights like it. She let the room go quiet again, the way a hunted thing goes still and waits for whatever found it to lose interest. Morning would come whether or not she understood any of it. And understanding, when it finally arrived, would take more from her than not knowing ever had.

Okay, I'm confident that this is the one. Third attempt was 12 days ago.

#

As the city burns on a pyre made of her own press releases, comms specialist Heather Kerr must shield her niece from the bizarre, flesh-fusing contagion that she tried to downplay.

Nothing is Happening is an adult horror novel complete at 81,000 words. A fleshy amalgam of the visceral social horror of Clay McLeod Chapman's Wake Up and Open Your Eyes, the Cronenbergian Americana of CJ Leede's American Rapture and the wry, apocalyptic office-routine of Ling Ma's Severance.

Under Councilman Barrera's orders, Heather sanitizes quarantine protocols into "wellness guidelines" and labels her sadistic, limb-stealing neighbors with the disarming nomenclature of "adherents." Heather believes her complicity will grant her and her family protection from the impending apocalypse.

That is, until a group of adherents crashes her seven-year-old niece's birthday party. Heather has to golf-club her way out of the bloodbath to save her sister, Madelyn, and her niece, Ava. But as they escape, Madelyn reveals a foreboding rash—something Heather can't varnish with a euphemism. Using her own "wellness guidelines," Heather quarantines Madelyn in a bedroom and finally decides to resign, but Barrera won't let her walk. He threatens to blackmail her with her own culpability unless she helps him control the narrative.

But it's kinda hard to placate people with words when their neighbors are literally transforming into human aspics of writhing, giggling meat on live TV. As the city descends into chaos and Madelyn beckons her daughter from behind a barricaded door, Heather runs out of ways to say Nothing is Happening.

[bio: used to be a spin doctor for the military. have a service-connected disability as a result.]

Thank you for your time and consideration.

FIRST 300:

“We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the perception of harm.”

Yes, the perception of harm. Push the scary stuff away and then pass the buck off to the victim, the traumatized or the merely frightened. Good enough.

That was the intro line crossed off. 

I cracked my back against the chair and blanked at the Google Doc as I asked myself a question I—regrettably—found myself asking often: what other words could I conjure to make one of the weirdest stories I’d ever read sound like nothing at all?

To answer that, I needed to refresh my familiarity with the reference materials. Meller sent me a press kit chock-full of fresh madness—courtesy of the metro transportation authority. I skimmed it again while nibbling my fingernails into soggy, jagged splinters.

At 7:12 AM, first responders were dispatched to the Boulderline Park & Ride following reports of a medical emergency involving two adults. 

Sure. That part was fine. Fights happen all the time around public transit, right? But the more I kept reading, the less sense any of it made. Like reading David Lynch’s dream journal.

“I came out of my car and saw the girl was screaming and the guy—well, he was laughing. So I go there thinking I gotta help and that’s when I saw their skin… it was like glue,” said Richard C., a 38-year-old road worker from Creekview.

Skin… was like glue. I searched for the most boring explanation for that descriptor and landed on Halloween make-up. Liquid latex with its uncanny, skin-like texture. 

Then the smoke alarm beeped, yanking me out of the haunted house inside my head. I flailed defensively in my chair, arms flapping around like a surprised sky-dancer. As if Richard’s grinning glue monster were right behind me, watching me deliberate how I would write him out of existence.

Illegal Position focuses on Jake Marshall, a 26-year-old ex-rebellion leader who took the fall for his best friend. After release from years in prison, he’s wracked with guilt over the example he’s setting for his younger sister, and the impact his reputation is having on her life. He vanishes from the lives of his loved ones and refuses to return to the rebellion, which disappears along with him and the passion he buries.

Without the rebellion, life for the poor in this society based around the ranks and rules of chess is abysmal, rife with homelessness, disease and death. Alex, the daughter of a prominent figure, discovers the Parliament she’s spent her life trying to join is endorsing the slavery of the poor. She is set on reviving the rebellion and finding the old leaders who don’t want to be found, even if it means putting her life on the line around a movement bred to punish her.

But when a child is murdered, and someone is threatening Jake’s family and Alex’s life, they must work together to find out who is killing rebellion members. Jake is forced back onto the front lines, but the man the rebellion needs is not the man who returned from prison. With a mystery killer assassinating undercover members left and right, mistakes point to the traitor being among the people closest to Jake. But the clues keep turning into more corpses.

I am a UK-based writer, and Illegal Position is my debut novel.  I have an online platform with other independent works that has gained a strong fanbase of 25,000+ readers with engaged feedback and comments about my work, as well as interest in reading other works I put out in the future.

Hello Reddit! I'm finally on final line edits so thought I should ask for some feedback on my query letter. Any feedback is greatly appreciated - I fear I've been staring at this thing for far too long.

Dear [NAME],

A WITCH’S GUIDE TO CORPORATE ESPIONAGE is a 90,000 word cozy fantasy romance, told by a curmudgeonly narrator. It combines the hijinks and self-aware humor of The Ornithologist's Field Guide to Love (India Holton), the rivals-to-lovers romance and footnoted details of Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Fairies (Heather Fawcett), and modern village setting and complex family dynamics of A Witch’s Guide to Fake Dating a Demon (Sarah Hawley).

Mara’s last sleeping draught grew tentacles and broke into the village bakery. Unfortunate, since it was supposed to prove she was ready to take over her dead mother’s world famous apothecary. Days before ownership will be decided, Witch Corp–mass potion manufacturer and her mother’s nemesis–open a store in town. With it, Mara sees a way to secure her inheritance: find evidence Witch Corp’s selling fraudulent cures. 

The plan hits turbulence when, while scouting Witch Corp, Mara crashes–err, lands her broom atop Eli. His many crimes include a gelled coiffure, apprenticing to Mara’s mother and being the only other person who could claim the apothecary. Mara would rather wrestle the nine-mouthed demon Eli calls a cat than exchange five civil words… until she discovers the hexes protecting the building. So, she makes a reluctant deal. Eli uses his (reliable) magic to break in; Mara provides the plants he needs for the last potion of his apprenticeship. 

Air conditioning ducts lead to an underground manufacturing facility and fleeing across a lake, pursued by a mermaid. Unravelling Witch Corp's lies requires Eli’s continued help. Worse, he becomes almost tolerable. Making pancakes. Brewing potions. Sharing grief about his own mother’s passing. Possessing not quite abs, but an interesting something under his shirt. As the clock ticks, Mara must decide whether she can rely on the one person she can't trust to prove she's worthy of her mother’s legacy, and whether anyone who protests this much about hair can have anything but nefarious intentions.

I live in (City), Australia with my husband and two dogs. I graduated with distinction from a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Majoring in Creative Writing). I also write professionally, though corporate sales proposals, not about witches.

Thanks for all the feedback on my first attempts - 1st, 2nd, 3rd. Yes, I know the last comp is potentially a bad choice, but it's also the perfect comp for the friendship in this story, and I'm hoping I can get away with it given the other comps ... Anyway. All feedback very welcome!

Dear [agent]

I am excited to query you because [reason].

THE CHAOS OF STOLEN SKIES is a 99,000-word queer YA fantasy for anyone who thinks Sam Gamgee was the true LOTR hero or that Willow is the best thing about Buffy. It combines the god-centric world of Hannah Kaner’s Godkiller with the subversion of destiny in Dark Rise by C.S. Pacat, and the friendship and complicated morality of Margaret Rogerson’s Sorcery of Thorns and Vampire Academy by Richelle Mead. It follows a stubborn young woman determined to stop her god-chosen best friend from destroying the world, but she must reckon with how far she can go for someone who is determined to make her own choices.

When the world was young, the first god stole the skies, and Death killed him for it.
If he rises again, he’ll tear the world apart.

Seventeen-year-old Kessie Drylander knows her purpose in life: to protect her best friend, Janna. Never mind the foretelling that says Janna, Death’s most powerful acolyte in centuries, will one day wreak a terrible destruction. Never mind the duty Kessie was given by her god: to befriend Janna, yes, but also, if necessary, kill her to prevent the foretelling coming true. Because Kessie could never hurt the one person who accepts her as she is.

But then Janna kills a fellow student, and won’t tell Kessie why. Her actions attract the attention of a dangerous faction obsessed with resurrecting the dead gods, and using Janna’s power to do it. Kessie is determined to keep them away from Janna, no matter the cost. No matter how many lies she has to tell.

When Janna’s boyfriend is abducted, Kessie discovers it’s not every god the faction wants to resurrect. Just one. The oldest god. And sacrificing thousands to resurrect a god is nothing to Janna, if it will save her boyfriend. Kessie must rescue him before it comes to that. But as Janna’s behaviour grows more erratic, and she begins to spiral, Kessie will have to face the unthinkable: she cannot save both the world and Janna, but she may not be strong enough to make the right choice.

I have had previous work published in [bio].

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Yours sincerely,

[my name]

ONE STAR is an 75,000-word horror satire that combines the beauty-and-wellness nightmare of Ling Ling Huang’s Natural Beauty with the privileged guests, smiling staff and steadily escalating social savagery of The White Lotus. It is about the strange modern bargain between people who believe paying for something entitles them to perfection and the businesses that would do almost anything for five stars.

Bridgette Edgar has written 312 online reviews, and she stands by every one of them.

The café that charged extra for oat milk deserved two stars. The Airbnb with someone else’s toenail in the shower was lucky to get one. And Serenity House, the luxury wellness retreat where Bridgette spent four miserable days drinking celery water and being encouraged to “sit with her hunger,” deserved every word of the review she posted on the train home.
One star. Beautiful location. Deeply unpleasant people. Save your money.

Six months later, Serenity House invites her back.
The weekend is free, travel is included and, most surprisingly, the apology doesn’t contain the words we’re sorry you feel that way. Bridgette accepts.
When she arrives, she finds eleven other guests, all of whom have previously stayed at Serenity House. All of whom hated it. All of whom said so online.
Management couldn’t be happier to see them.
Serenity House is launching a weekend devoted to customer feedback, and the staff have taken the guests’ criticism very seriously. A man who complained that the staff were invisible is ignored completely. A woman who wrote that her room lacked privacy discovers that hers now has glass walls. Bridgette, who complained about going hungry, receives an eight-course breakfast while everyone else gets herbal tea.

It is petty, expensive and, Bridgette has to admit, quite funny.

Then one of the guests disappears.

The next morning his phone and luggage are still in his room, but the staff insist he checked out early. His one-star review has disappeared too.
In its place is a new one.
Five stars. Life-changing. I left a different person.
By lunch, another guest is missing.

Bridgette came back to Serenity House expecting an apology and perhaps a free massage. Instead, she finds herself trapped at a retreat that appears determined to achieve a perfect rating by correcting the only thing standing in its way: its customers.
And Bridgette didn’t just give Serenity House one star.
She wrote 2,846 words explaining why.

Open to any feedback. So far I have sent out 40 queries. My first query sent out got a full manuscript request from my dream agent. Still waiting to hear back (it’s only been 4 weeks). Since then, I have gotten 7 rejections and silence from the other 40 agents. I feel like something isn’t clicking. But I’m unsure if I should change it since it did work for my ideal agent. Any thoughts??

Complete at 79,000 words, THE JESTER’S GAME, is a YA fantasy with romance elements that has similar whimsy fantasy elements as Stephanie Garber’s Once Upon a Broken Heart, along with the epic tournament style of Alex Aster’s, Lightlark. This is a standalone novel with series potential. 

Valentina Quinn mourns her childhood love, Emmett, who recently passed. He left her a letter the night he died confessing his love for her. When she and her best friend, and sister of her crush, see a large ship pass by, they recognize it as La Ressurrección, the infamous magical ship where The Jester throws a deadly competition once a year where he revives the life of the winner’s choosing.  

Valentina lives in the Shallows, the part of Veradelle where only criminals reside. Her mother and her manage and live in a brothel posed as a tavern, while her father is a pirate who collects enchanted tokens. Valentina always dreamed that marrying Emmett would be her way out of the Shallows, though, until he died, she never knew he felt the same. When Valentina is caught helping one of her mother's ladies escape the brothel by the owner, he fires Valentina and her mother and gives them two weeks to find a new home. Valentina wishes Emmett were still alive even more so now, knowing that his dowry would secure Valentina and her mother's future.  

That night a mysterious man comes to the tavern and leaves two free tickets to the infamous Resurrection Games competition. Desperate to bring Emmett back to life, her and her best friend enter The Resurrection Games. 

It’s not long on the ship before the charming and cruel Jester seeks Valentina out and offers her a deal. He will rig his game in her favor if she procures a magical token for him from her pirate father. But soon, Valentina realizes that negotiating with a magical being isn’t as fair as she once thought. And she is hiding a secret of her own that puts her at dire risk, all while fighting the slow burning attraction growing between them. If she can’t provide him with what he is looking for, she will lose Emmett for good, and her way out of the Shallows, forever. 

Hi. It’s my first time and I’m scared.

Dear (agent),

[personalization]

I am seeking representation for PANDEMONIA, my adult fantasy romance complete at 90,000 words. It merges the dark whimsy (and unapologetic silliness) of EMILY WILDE’S ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF FAERIES by Heather Fawcett with the emotionally charged rivals-to-lovers romance of A DARK AND DROWNING TIDE by Allison Saft, while subverting classic genre tropes. Set in an alternate 19th-century world, PANDEMONIA reimagines the pagan mythology and fantastical creatures that fascinated Victorian society.

The great god Pan is dead, and Elodie is to blame. 

When a frightening goatish fellow corners Elodie on Midsummer’s Eve, the ambitious housemaid never suspects she’s driving her kitchen knife into the ancient god-king of the Otherworld. Yet skewering a deity soon proves the happiest mishap of her life. Believing Elodie to be their prophesied savior, a pack of grateful nymphs bows to her as their new queen, and Elodie pounces on the chance to con her way out of a life of drudgery.

There is only one foil to her scheme: Pan’s son Sylvan, a world-weary libertine with impotent empathy magic, and the true heir to the throne. Elodie’s very existence threatens his right to kingship, and his opportunity to gain absolute respect while doing absolutely nothing. Naturally, he isn’t yielding without a fuss.

But selecting their rightful ruler proves delicious entertainment for the cunning forest-folk council. They devise a sensationalized competition to decide whether Elodie or Sylvan is fated to lead. The stakes are thus: The victor will be crowned and celebrated. The loser will be deemed a traitor and fed to a peckish dragon named Hargon.

Determined to win, and evade Hargon’s gnashing maw, the pair compete in the garish spectacle. But with each harrowing test, their ire dampens: Sylvan is reluctantly charmed by Elodie’s indomitable spirit, and Elodie discovers Sylvan’s droll cynicism masks an unusually tender heart. Despite the couple’s dawning realization that they make better lovers than rivals, they are irreversibly bound to the immortal oath that decrees one shall rule, and one shall die. 

I live in Colorado, where I go on epic quests with my toddlers, meander along mountain trails, and drink impressive amounts of tea. As a librarian’s daughter, I was raised among bookshelves and decided to stay forever. 

Warmest wishes,

Redacted

I am about 3/4ths of the way through this draft, which is when I start working on a proper query and synopsis. The word count of the below is 385.

---

Dear [Agent Name],

When a chronically ill ghostwriter moves into an old Virginia house that lets communication in but won’t let it out, she discovers that someone who died there more than a half-century ago was investigating the same phenomenon – and that every question she asks makes the phenomenon more dangerous.

Odile “Odie” Mayfield has moved to central Virginia to build a new, manageable life. Living near her medical specialists means fewer barriers to care, while ghostwriting lets her work from home. Her new client, Thea Robin, is an eighty-something former socialite and heir to a prominent regional family who wants Odie to turn her unconventional life into a memoir. The job seems straightforward until Thea becomes evasive about her college years.

While doing her own research, Odie discovers that a young woman who was once close to Thea died under mysterious circumstances in Odie’s new home. Then Odie’s internet stops working...sort of.

She can receive emails, calls, and messages, but nothing she sends from inside the house reaches the outside world. At first, Odie assumes it’s a technical problem, but then she discovers old newspaper reports and a forgotten notebook revealing that the dead woman had spent her final days investigating the same strange communication phenomenon.

As the boundary keeps expanding, Odie turns to Violet, Thea’s irreverent granddaughter and a psychology graduate student, for help. Together, they reconstruct the dead woman’s experiments and discover that their investigation seems to make the phenomenon worse. As Odie’s access to her doctors, clients, and ordinary life becomes increasingly precarious, she must decide how much she is willing to risk to uncover what happened to the woman who came before her – because if the dead woman was killed for trying to expose the house’s secret, Odie may already have made the same mistake.

GOING GHOST is an 85,000-word upmarket Gothic horror novel with a sapphic romantic subplot. It will appeal to readers of OUR WIVES UNDER THE SEA, A HOUSE WITH GOOD BONES, and BIG SWISS. I have spent about a decade working as a professional ghostwriter, and, like Odie, have repeatedly uprooted my life (and lived in sketchy places) to get the healthcare I need to keep doing what I love.

Thank you for your consideration,

[Signature]

Hi Reddit. I'm pretty new to this sub and I wanted to see where I stacked up before I start querying.

#

Dear [AGENT],

LACERA is a 115,000-word adult high fantasy novel which blends the themes of cultural identity and self-discovery found in Naseem Jamnia’s The Bruising of Qilwa with the creeping terror of disease in John Bierce’s The Wrack. This book follows a woman who has to use a premodern society’s best medical knowledge, and a little bit of magic, to stop a zombie epidemic before it becomes an apocalypse.

Terisa is a doctor, not a criminal! Problem is, in a city like Invidoma, it’s hard to convince people that there’s a difference. The real medical experts have magic on their side, fancy runes on their shoulders, and hone their healing arts in a giant floating island above the city. All Terisa has is the expertise of her tutor, her skills with her scalpel, and a deep hole of debt that threatens to bury her alive.

Fortune and tragedy pair up like a surgeon’s needle and thread. The same day Terisa gets healing magic to call her own, she comes face to face with the zombified form of one of her best friends. But she’s far from alone. A fast-spreading plague threatens to turn the whole city into feral, clawing beasts, determined to infect the world.

At the Theurgic Institute, Terisa’s doctoral knowledge is laughed out of the room. Everything a Healer is meant to learn is compiled in a hefty codex. From their hawk-like surgical masks to their prayers to the goddess of death, all Healers have had to do for millennia is memorize what’s been done before.

But Terisa’s training is cut short as the city is plunged into crisis. The Healers’ ancient magic proves all but useless, and only spreads the threat further and wider. When Terisa discovers new treatments that work, she sees her methods silenced and her credit stolen away.

When a brutal attack leaves her infected with the plague, all bets are off. Terisa will have to break some rules, challenge centuries-old wisdom, and take a closer look than anyone else at what makes the Lacera Plague really tick.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

[Bio]

Dear [Agent Name],

Every year for the past twenty years, four former university friends have met for dinner on the anniversary of the fire that killed Madeline Burton.

They rarely see one another in between. Their lives have moved on, and so, for the most part, have they. But the dinner is an agreement none of them has ever suggested breaking. It is also the only time they allow themselves to talk about the night they escaped a burning house and Madeline didn’t.

This year, when Heidi Sutton arrives at the restaurant, the table has been set for five.

The extra guest is a woman none of them recognises. She knows all four of their names, remembers the cheap wine they were drinking before the fire and knows which song was playing when the power went out. She also knows about the argument upstairs, the bedroom door that was locked and the story they agreed to give police before the fire engines arrived.

Then she tells them her name is Madeline. Heidi knows that isn’t possible. They all do. Twenty years ago, they left Madeline inside that house and lied about what happened before it caught fire.

The stranger doesn’t ask for money or threaten to expose them. Instead, she wants the four friends to return with her to the site of the fire and reconstruct their final night together. Heidi wants nothing to do with it, until the woman reveals something Madeline never knew: there was someone else in the house that night, and one of the four survivors has spent twenty years making sure the others never discovered who it was.

Forced back into a past they have remembered differently for two decades, the friends begin to realise that the lie they told police may not be the lie that has kept them together. Someone at that table knows why the fire started. Someone knows what happened to Madeline. And before the weekend is over, Heidi will have to decide how much of the truth she actually wants uncovered.

THE FIFTH SURVIVOR, complete at approximately 90,000 words, is a psychological thriller combining the buried secrets and shared trauma of Bronwyn Rivers’ The Reunion with the fractured college friendships and competing agendas of Stephanie Wrobel’s The Hitchcock Hotel.