Over the past couple of months, I’ve attended three conferences (one by Internet) that featured pitches or queries. Friends asked for a summary. The summary grew longer than a blog post, so I made it into a page, here.
The summary covers some of what I learned. The experience proved that the nexus of art and business is anything but clear, but it helped me understand that querying and pitching are much less about writing quality and much more about business. The agent’s operative question, at least at first, is not, “Is this person a fine writer?” or “Is this story/character/plot captivating?” It is, “Will this book sell?” Nothing at all wrong with that, but it helps me write a better query. As one presenter said, a good query letter induces the agent to ask for some/all of the manuscript (where that fine writing resides); the query/pitch is a business proposition.
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Author: John Rogers
I have thought of myself as a writer for most of my adult life. In 2011, I became a fiction writer full time. I studied creative writing as an English major in college. Then came family and career. I worked in finance and biotech and did a wonderful stint in Vienna. Now, I have the opportunity to use those experiences as the substrate for my stories. My first novel takes on the world of Big Data and the very timely issue of cyber war. The second uses the manipulation of financial derivatives as impetus for attempted murder during a trip from Vienna to Budapest on the Danube.
I have taken writing instruction at the Cape Cod Writers Conference and from The Loft in Minneapolis. I am finding writers’ groups to be very helpful as concept editors, as well as practical advice from the published authors. I am in three such groups. I have taken writing instruction at the Cape Cod Writers Conference and from The Loft in Minneapolis.
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