Querying

I have begun querying FINDING IZZY, which means I’m searching for a literary agent who believes in my story enough to pitch it to publishers. Querying is one of the most dreaded parts of traditional publishing because it is competitive, time-consuming, and—perhaps most of all—lonely. Rejections can be discouraging, much like a job search that seems to be going nowhere. But despite all the waiting and wondering, I’ve discovered that querying can also make you a better writer.

Refining my pitch. Just when I think I’ve discovered every catchy way to describe my story, I come up with another possibility. One of the great ironies of writing a book is that you can spend years building, revising, and polishing a 55,000-word story, only to discover that describing the whole thing in one sentence or one paragraph can be surprisingly difficult. And yet, figuring out how to distill your story to its essence is a very important part of the process.

Learning my story inside and out. That may sound strange, but when you’re forced to develop a logline, a one-sentence pitch, a one-paragraph pitch, a three-paragraph pitch, comparison titles, one-, two-, and three-page synopses, character descriptions, and chapter summaries—all things I’ve been asked to produce—you really get to know your book. Inside, outside, upside, downside, and everywhere in between. You really begin to discern its themes, even ones that are hard to define.

Persuasive letter writing. A query letter is an opportunity to tell an agent what your story is about, but it’s also a form of promotional writing. It has to be clear and succinct while being compelling enough to make someone want to keep reading. I actually enjoy the challenge of trying to catch an agent’s eye in a page or less. It’s a very structured piece of writing—and one where you want every word to count.

Granmance. If I had never set out to query FINDING IZZY, I might never have thought up the word granmance. A query typically includes a sentence like this: I am pleased to query you with FINDING IZZY, a contemporary YA novel complete at 55,000 words. In other words, you have to state your genre. But “contemporary young adult” sounded so bland to my ear that I knew I needed a better way to describe my story. What makes FINDING IZZY distinctive is that its central “love story” isn’t a romance between two teens. It’s the transformative relationship between a granddaughter and her step-grandmother. I wanted a word that could capture that kind of love—a word that could sit alongside romance without being confused with it. And that’s when I thought of granmance: grandparent + romance. What began as a way to describe my novel has grown into something much bigger. I’m now in the process of trademarking the term, and I’ve started building a website around the idea. All because I had to figure out a better way to describe my book in a query letter.

Dreaming. This might be my favorite part. Imagining that my agent is out there somewhere, and that someday they’re going to discover my story and think, This is it. I want to represent this. If you can dream up a novel, you can certainly dream up an agent. And once you start dreaming, it’s hard to stop. You imagine the book cover. The first box of author copies. A book signing. A reader telling you how much your story meant to them. Kids sitting in a classroom talking about your book. Wow.

Querying may be full of rejection, uncertainty, and waiting, but it has also forced me to be a better storyteller, a sharper communicator, and a person with a dream—of a book in print, in the hands of a reader, who is swept up in a compelling story.