Weekly Writing Contest

Weekly Writing Contest QueryShark Bite

Hello there and thanks for stopping by to check out this week's contest.

This week is going to be hard. I'm not going to lie to you.

As so many of us here are aspiring authors, seriously considering how to publish our work, I thought that I would give you all a chance to work on your getting published skills.

You may be a first-time writer who doesn't know what needs to be done to get published, or you may be an experienced writer who has published many times before, but the one thing that you all have in common is that in order to get your story published you need to get an agent interested in selling it to a publisher for you.

The way to do that is to write a query letter.

Here comes the hard part.

Writing a query letter is not as easy as you think and being able to write well doesn't always mean being able to write a good query. There is a lot that you need to know in order to get your query to catch the attention of the agent and not get sent automatically to the 'form reject' pile.

Now, I'm a first-time writer myself, so I'm going to send you to someone who knows more about query letters than any one person should have to. I want you to go check out the blog of super literary agent Janet Reid of Fine Print Literary Management at queryshark.blogspot.com and read her advice. (external link is provided)

Once you've seen how to write an awesome query letter, I want you to come back and write one for your story. Don't bother with the greetings or address and contact stuff, I don't need it and you don't have space for it. I want to see your letter and the closing only.

One thing that Ms. Reid always stresses is that a query letter should be for one story only so if you have three stories that you want to write a query letter for, you need to write three letters, not try to cram them all into one.

This is a skill that you really need to perfect to get your writing on the path to publication so I really hope you all take the opportunity to try this.

As usual, there is a space limit, 2000 characters, which is a good thing since a real query letter should be no more than 250 words.

And this contest closes on midnight, Friday, February 18, 2011.

Best of luck to you all and have a Happy Valentine's Day this week.