Query Guru: Ground Your Readers

Query & First Page Feedback (Women's Fiction)

Exciting day here at Query Guru: we are going to look at an author’s query letter AND first page.

Both were submitted by a subscriber. Some details have been removed to protect their privacy. If you would like a chance to receive feedback on your query letter and first page, please fill out the following Query Guru form. (You do not have to be a paid subscriber to receive feedback!)

The query letter for this novel has promise — I suspect there’s a complex, emotional story here, but it suffers from a lot of the same problems I see in other query letters:

• It’s not specific enough.

• It’s too coy, with too many generalities. (In the query you want to give unique details, even if that means revealing the big secret or twist. I know it’s scary to give away “the good stuff,” but trust me. That’s how you get an agent’s attention. Vagueness is the kiss of death in a query.)

• It tells what the story is about (“This is a story of healing…”) and how the reader will feel about it (“each of the three POV characters has a satisfying emotional arc…”) instead of telling more specifics about what actually happens.

The first page also has promise, but it doesn’t ground the reader in a scene. I will explain what I mean by this and how you go about grounding your reader (plus examples!) when we get to the first page.

Let’s take a look at the original query with my numbered comments after each paragraph: