Donna Murphy - How to Write a Query Letter: Everything You Need to Know Explained Simply

A few years back we lost our beloved pet dog Bear, who was not only our best and dearest friend but also the Vice President of Sunshine here at Atlantic Publishing. He did not receive a salary but worked tirelessly 24 hours a day to please his parents.

Bear was a rescue dog who turned around and showered myself, my wife, Sherri, his grandparents Jean, Bob, and Nancy, and every person and animal he met (well, maybe not rabbits) with friendship and love. He made a lot of people smile every day.

We wanted you to know a portion of the profits of this book will be donated in Bears memory to local animal shelters, parks, conservation organizations, and other individuals and nonprofit organizations in need of assistance.

Douglas and Sherri Brown

PS: We have since adopted two more rescue dogs: first Scout, and the following year, Ginger. They were both mixed golden retrievers who needed a home.

Want to help animals and the world? Here are a dozen easy suggestions you and your family can implement today:

• Adopt and rescue a pet from a local shelter.
• Support local and no-kill animal shelters.
• Plant a tree to honor someone you love.
• Be a developer put up some birdhouses.
• Buy live, potted Christmas trees and replant them.
• Make sure you spend time with your animals each day.
• Save natural resources by recycling and buying recycled products.
• Drink tap water, or filter your own water at home.
• Whenever possible, limit your use of or do not use pesticides.
• If you eat seafood, make sustainable choices.
• Support your local farmers market.
• Get outside. Visit a park, volunteer, walk your dog, or ride your bike.

Five years ago, Atlantic Publishing signed the Green Press Initiative. These guidelines promote environmentally friendly practices, such as using recycled stock and vegetable-based inks, avoiding waste, choosing energy-efficient resources, and promoting a no-pulping policy. We now use 100-percent recycled stock on all our books. The results: in one year, switching to post-consumer recycled stock saved 24 mature trees, 5,000 gallons of water, the equivalent of the total energy used for one home in a year, and the equivalent of the greenhouse gases from one car driven for a year.

Dedication

To my family, who continue to support me as I pursue my dreams.

Introduction

Q uery letters are not just for the seasoned writer. Novice writers also can benefit from selling by query. The primary impetus behind the query is to save time for both the editor and the writer. Editors are bombarded daily with unsolicited manuscripts and articles, which makes it more enticing for them to read a one-page query letter instead of a ten-page story or proposal. Writers submitting a tailored query letter do not waste valuable time or energy preparing a full article that might be rejected. For these two reasons alone, the query letter has become the most effective way for a writer to break into the market and for the editors to acquire the work they need selectively.

In addition to the obvious benefit of saving time, there are several other benefits to querying:

Queries are more cost-effective for the writer compared to spending time and money writing and sending entire articles or manuscripts that may not be accepted.

A well-crafted query can lead to unexpected assignments that were different from the writers original idea.

Queries that present good ideas could produce multiple assignments.

Multiple queries can increase the number of markets you
could enter.

Queries substantially multiply your prospects and increase your chances of getting more assignments or offers and could lead to more opportunities for your work to be published.

Queries are easier to customize for different publications.

Instead of sending in complete articles or manuscripts, why not profit more with less? Submitting a concise, tailored letter that presents your ideas to an editor is a more effective and productive way to solicit feedback and determine if you need to invest more time or energy into pursuing the idea. The beauty of this approach is that you can commit more of your time to submitting multiple queries to several markets simultaneously. Again, this increases your chances of landing assignments because you are submitting to several markets rather than submitting to one publication and waiting to get a response.