Query Letters

Query letters are little gems that you have to write to introduce yourself and your writing and your piece, along with mention of any research and previous publications. You should know the editor's name and what they are looking for. Your tone should be appropriate to the journal/magazine/publishing house by whom you wish to be published.

I have a stash of query letters; however, I'm not consistent at sending out my work. I'm really busy - it's not just an excuse. Right now I'm sitting on one of my kid's beds listening to him snore, and typing in the dark. Thank goodness for light-up keyboards, which I insisted on getting on my last purchase of a laptop. I knew I'd be spending a lot of time in the dark with my keyboard.

Back to the subject at hand... all previously written query letters are slightly different one from the other, and none apply to my current essay. Therefore, the hours spent on typing up query letters in the past have only just prepared me to type up a new one again; they were practice.

I have an essay I'd like to submit to a family-type magazine, and I'm going over their submission guidelines. They want to know everything about the essay, but they don't want to see the actual essay. Huh? They only want to know about it. And they want this distillation in about a page.

Why not just ask to read the essay?

And they want experts and citations. My little essay is not really bent that way, but I can tweak it. I need to count words and see if I can fit the rather lengthy essay into a publishable format. So there will be cutting...

This is only the first place I'm thinking of sending it. In all, by the time I have written and polished a piece, and it's just sitting there looking pretty, there is still a lot to do. So I'm going to *sigh* write up a draft query, and look up a couple of statistics before I can join my kids in their snoring.