by Lanee' Blunt
When you are a new writer it seems impossible to break into one of the major magazine markets. How should you approach one of the magazine publishers you may be asking yourself? Maybe you have heard that sending the magazine a query letter is how you should get your article sold, but as a new writer the query letter seems intimidating. It sounds like something only professional writers' use.
When writing a non-fiction article never send the publisher a completed manuscript on speculation. They are only going to accept a query letter from you and if you send them your completed manuscript they will just put it back in the package and send it back to you rejected. A query letter is a detailed one page proposal of what you are intending to write. "A longtime rule for query letters is: Keep it to one page. That's still a good rule. Without it, writers might assume they have carte blanche to write a novella-which, given the chance, many would do." According to John Wood's book, How to Write Attention-Grabbing Query & Cover Letters; 1996.
Query Letters Can Get You Past the Slush Pile
One advantage of using a query letter is that it can take your manuscript from unsolicited to solicited. Your manuscript will be rejected and put back into the envelope if you are not sending a query letter, but if you send the query the editor might ask you to send the manuscript. There is no guarantee that it will be sold, but only looked at.
Small Amount of Research
When you write the query letter you are going to make it interesting and the advantage is that you are going to do a small amount of research in the query. If you were to do the whole manuscript you would have a lot of research, but with the query your research is minimum.
Editor Samples Your Writing
In the query the editor is able to sample your writing and can tell if you are a good enough writer to handle the article. If your query is interesting then it may intrigue the editor and make her ask for more, like the whole manuscript. Make sure that you write the query like you would the whole manuscript leaving nothing out and revealing even the ending. This is not the place to write, "You will get the rest when I send the article, because there is a surprise ending."
Professional
The query is professional and it gives the editor the confidence in your writing that you know what you are doing. Make sure that on your query you know the editor's name, and what type of stories that she buys. Send a self addressed stamped envelope (SASE) with all of your queries.
How Many
When you are first starting out you can have at least ten queries at a time floating around. Make sure that you send a different query to each magazine because you cannot send out simultaneous queries of the same article.
These are some of the advantages of using query letters. They are a great tool for the writer because they save you a lot of time and you don't write the article until it is requested.
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Saturday, October 1, 2011
