Episode 2: Queries

K:

Hello, my beautiful cinnabar moths, or any kind of moth you want to be. Welcome to another episode of The Writers Triangle, the Cinnabar Moth’s Publishing podcast about all things books and publishing. Today, I’m going to be talking about the query letter. And the reason that I picked talking about the query letter is because we have had such a wide variety of really wonderful, amazing query letters, and some not so amazing query letters. And what I find interesting is the range… I find several things interesting. One is the range of bad advice that’s out there from publishing professionals that you would think would be giving good advice, and the queries that they quote that really caught their attention.

And then secondly, when people are less than honest in the query, and that’s never a good way to start off a relationship, with deceit. There’s also aggressive queries that again, not a good way to start off the relationship. And queries that have nothing to do with the book, which is bizarre and interesting. And then amazing query letters that make me say, “Yes, I absolutely want to read that book.” So if you go to our Submissions page on cinnabarmoth.com, you’ll find that our submission says just send us a manuscript, because I find query letters to be the bane of my existence. I do not enjoy reading queries.

I find queries to be one of the most disappointing aspects of publishing, which is shocking to me because I didn’t think that I would care that much about them queries, but some of them are just so bad. And I feel really bad for the person, and I feel like if this was my only introduction to them and the book, the answer would be no. It just would be. And we would never get to the place of yes, and I wouldn’t publish them. And I would have missed out on some really amazing books. And I find it interesting because so many people do read our Submissions page and know that they can just send us a full manuscript, and do.

And sometimes I get 50 pages, the manuscript. I’m like, “This is a really good book. I wonder what their query looks like,” and the query has nothing to do with the book. I have absolutely no idea why they would think that what they wrote in their query has anything to do with their book. And it sometimes feels like someone different wrote the query than who wrote the book, and that’s kind of… I know there are professional query letter writers out there. Don’t let them write your query. They don’t know your book and they won’t do your book justice.

And I think that a great query letter for me, that gets me excited, is when I’m like, “This could be the blurb.” Like, “This would be a great blurb for this book.” And that’s particular to me. Other people, they don’t want the query to be the blurb, and I don’t know why. It doesn’t make any sense to me because it’s most intuitive to me. The blurb is the thing that’s going to get people to read your book once your book is published, so wouldn’t the blurb be the best thing to put in your query letter before it’s published? Because if it motivates me to read your transcript, I mean your manuscript, then we know it’ll motivate readers to read your book kind of thing.

But if the query or the blurb on the back of the book doesn’t represent the book or isn’t related, you’re going to… and I talk with our authors about this all the time, and I think it’s probably a phrase they get sick of hearing, but readers’ expectations. And when you write your query letter, I’m a reader and you’re setting my expectation of what your book is going to be. And you’re also setting my expectation of who you are going to be as an author to work with. And if you don’t know your book and you don’t know your characters well enough to write your own query, for me that’s concerning because it makes me worry about your ability to edit, and it also makes me worry about how much editing we’re going to have to do and what your reaction to that editing is going to be.

And so sometimes I will read the query and read the book and have so many questions about who the author is, about what the book is about, and sometimes I just say no based on that; that the mismatch is too much for me. And I give really… I don’t send out just standard form letter rejections. I give really detailed rejection letters that are nice. I don’t just rip apart someone’s query and I don’t just rip apart someone’s book, but I do critique the query and I do critique the book and give pointers. And some authors have had some success with saying, “You know what? I read your critique. It makes total sense to me, and I went ahead and rewrote and resubmitted. Would you read it?”

Sometimes I’m like, “I know this book isn’t a good fit for us but I’ll read the 50 pages, anyway,” and then I give them critique and a more definitive no. And other times I’ve been like, “You know what? I really like the changes you’ve made. Let’s do a development deal,” and we go from there. And so that’s one outcome that can happen as a resubmit. But if you don’t have that initial disconnect from your query letter, not sounding authentically like you and not being about the book, then you’re less likely to have me read 50 pages, love the book, go back, read your query, and then question whether or not we’d be a good fit for you. Because if you don’t know your book, we’re not going to have an easy, working relationship. It’s going to be challenging because there’s going to be a lot of confusion and frustration on both sides of the street.

And I always try to help authors understand that you’re getting in a long-term relationship with… whenever you sign the contract. It’s a long-term relationship. And I want to make sure that the authors are comfortable and happy and feel good with the working dynamic and with the personality, because I have a personality. And if you sign with Cinnabar Moth, you deal with two people because of… I’m talking about something else that happens with querying. You deal with two people. The first person you deal with is me, and I’m not the only person deciding whether or not to say yes or no to a book. So there’s five of us and each of us care about something different.

And for me, I care about world-building and I care about author personality. We have someone else who’s like, if you have a bad query it’s going to be really hard to get them to say yes, because they start with the query and they’re like, “I have no desire to read this book.” And so someone else on the team has had to get past the query and read the book and kind of, “Hey, I think that this book is worth reading. Sorry that the query was so bad.” And then another team member cares a lot about grammar and cares a lot about consistency. If there’s a lot of inconsistencies in the book, they don’t like it. And then we have someone else who hates time jumps, and everybody has their own thing.

I’m not going to go through everybody because that’s a different, more in-depth sort of conversation about the Cinnabar Moth team and our decision-making process. I really want today to focus on the query letter. So the first thing that we just covered right now was, make sure that you know your book; one. And two, make sure that your query is about your book. And that ties into the next thing that I’m going to say. So if you go on YouTube or if you do a Google search for a query, they say name-dropping in a query is good. I find it off-putting, unless I have a personal relationship. So if you say that C.W. Allen, one of our authors, C.W. Allen thinks this book would be great for you, and it would be a good fit. I’m like, “Okay. I know C.W. That’s interesting to me. I know who C.W. is as a writer, I know who C.W. is as an author. I know how they are to work with. And there’s a certain comfort level there.”

If you tell me John Grisham said that we’re the right press for you, I know who John Grisham is but why would he be suggesting our press? And why didn’t he suggest you to his agent? And why didn’t he suggest you to his press? And if he did, did they reject you? And if they rejected you, why did they reject you? What’s wrong? So when you name-drop and I don’t know the person, it just questions, questions in my mind, and I’m immediately now negatively primed. And everyone else on the team is negatively primed because if you have a friend who has a New York bestseller and I don’t know who they are personally, on a personal level, why didn’t their agent pick up your book? Why didn’t they introduce you to their agent? Why didn’t they walk your manuscript into their agent’s office or into their publisher’s office and fight for it? And are they currently represented?

So then when I should be thinking about your book, I’m Googling this person that you’ve mentioned that I don’t know. And one, I’m saying, “Okay, if they had a bestseller…” I know an author that had a bestseller, got dropped by their publisher, got dropped by their agent and never had a second book of any consequence. And I’m really sorry that that happened to them, and I’m sorry that that’s their story and I hope that’s not the entirety of their story. I also know that one book seller doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t make you rich. It doesn’t guarantee that your next books are going to sell. So as a publisher, knowing someone who has a bestseller, and there are so many different ways to get a bestseller, what kind of bestseller is it? What list is it on as a bestseller?

And as publishers, we know the requirements for each of the list, and some are more impressive than other. And then, New York Times is not impressive to me, personally. So if you have a New York Times bestseller, for me, I have a thing against the New York Times as a publication. I don’t like them as a newspaper. I also don’t like the way they do their bestseller, and I also know that there is a bias built into the way that they do their bestseller. So to me, it doesn’t feel as clean or crisp as a different bestseller list, and I’m not going to list my bestseller list that I like because I don’t want those in the query. So if I don’t know the person personally and I Google them, and they have one bestseller but they haven’t published anything since, I wonder why. And so then I’m like, “Okay, are they an English teacher? Did they go into a different field?”

And I’m spending 30, 45 minutes researching this person I don’t know, when that’s 30, 45 minutes I could spend falling in love with your book. And time is of the essence, and so if I spend 30 to 45 minutes and then I’m disappointed, I go into your manuscript feeling disappointed. If the people that you’ve name-dropped don’t impress me personally, I go into the manuscript disappointed, which means that I’m more critical. And it means that I’m less patient, and it means that you have five pages to catch my interest. And isn’t that shocking? I went from reading 50 pages to five. And that’s why I don’t read queries first. That’s why I read the 50 pages first, because I’ve found that there have been some queries that have been so off-putting, I’m just “no”. I’m an automatic “no”.

So there’s one person on the team who really cares about queries and always reads them. There’s me, who hates query letters. I absolutely hate them. I hope everybody just sends me a partial read. Please, send at least 50 pages so I can read it, because if your query is a mess you’ll have at least one person on the team who’s read your pages and we’ll talk the other people into reading at least 10, or reading at least one. There is one person, it’s like if you have a bad query they’ll read one page, and if one page is good. So having a bad query really leaves a bad taste in people’s mouths. Another way to have a bad query, besides name-dropping strangers, is telling me or anyone… I don’t think any publisher likes this query. One of the worst queries we got was someone who wanted a $100,000 launch for their book. And they said, “This is a guaranteed bestseller.”

No, it’s not, sweetie. No book is. Okay? That’s a hard truth. And I know ‘sweetie’ is condescending, but it’s offensive when you write me a letter and you don’t know me, and it’s not written to anybody specific because it’s a submission, and you opened the gate and opened the door with asking me for $100,000 to launch your book. And I’m like, one; what kind of launch costs $100,000? I didn’t even know; are we renting Tiffany’s or after hours or something for your launch? And then they detailed it, and again I got sidetracked. I was like, “Does this cost $100,000, everything they wanted to do?” And the answer was no, they wanted a $5,000 launch. So why are you saying $5,000 or $100,000, and why are you dictating terms of the launch of your book in a query?

If you’ve ever done that, don’t do it again because that is just an absolute no. I won’t read it. And if I’m reading, the person whose query is like, they demanded… they have a launch number, and I will immediately stop reading and send a very polite no, because I don’t want that energy. I don’t want you dictating terms to me. Now, I’m completely fine if I send, “Hey, we like your book. We’d like you to sign,” you get the contract and you’re like, “No, thank you,” or you want to ask if we give a better advance or you want to ask what our marketing plan is and our distribution plan; all of that is a legitimate question once we’ve said, “Yes, we want your book.” It’s not a legitimate demand in a query. I don’t know you. I don’t owe you anything. And that’s just a really off-putting response; queries that act like I owe them something or are really aggressive really turn me off.

And the books are usually written in the same way; very aggressive, very entitled. And entitlement, for me personally, is off-putting. So if hearing that entitlement is off-putting offends you, I’m not saying that this is the rule for every press. I’m saying this is the rule for Cinnabar Moth, and please don’t submit to us. If anything I’m saying in this episode is offensive to you, please don’t submit to us because we’re not the right press for you. But there may be a press out there that loves that aggressiveness, or that loves that you have a plan for launching your book and will negotiate, “Hey, this can be your complete advance.” Personally, I’m not throwing anybody a party. We do everything virtually.

We don’t do any in-person unless we get requests from bookstores, and we do not have a salesperson that goes around begging bookstores to have our authors come in and talk. We don’t do that. I know that the Big 5 does that for some authors, and we’ve found, when we looked into it and we did a cost analysis and a sales analysis, that old-fashioned book tours don’t sell books anymore. So going into the bookstore and doing a book tour for your first book doesn’t sell any copies, because nobody’s read it because nobody knows who you are. Now, if you have a best-selling book, once the book is a bestseller, then going on tour sells more copies. But once you have a bestseller, doing almost anything sells more copies.

So that’s something that we try to help authors understand, but if you come out the gate demanding that we give you $100,000 to launch your book, the answer is no. No, I’m not giving you $100,000. I’m not giving you $50. If you send me an email asking me for $1, I’m just going to say no. No. The query letter is not the time to make any demands. If you’re making demands in your query letter of how you want things to go, most people are going to pass on your book because they’re not going to get to the book, because they don’t know you. They don’t know your book. And you’re already saying that you’re going to be demanding to work with, and that you feel you know better than they do about how to launch your book.

And every press has a launch plan for every book. And every press has a basic launch plan for the books that are in their catalog. And if you want to know what somebody’s going to get, what their launch package is, go look what they’ve done for their other books. What have their other books done? Go look on their social media. When they’re talking about their other books, what kind of things are they doing to promote their books? Because those are the kinds of things they’re most likely to do to promote yours. So finding a distribution plan and finding out a promotion plan is super easy these days. You just go on the publisher’s social media. For us, you can go on Cinnabar Moth on our Twitter, or you can go to cinnabarmoth.com and you can see that we do virtual tours, you can see that we arrange speaking engagements, that we do arrange some in-person.

It’s actually, everything’s on Zoom these days. By the time you’re listening to it and if it’s way in the future, we might be back to in-person things. But right now we’re still doing things virtually because we want to keep our writers safe, and not everyone’s vaccinated yet. So looking at that, and we have international writers and we find that we’re at an advantage if we say we do things virtually, because we have writers that live in Japan who are giving talks in the UK. We have writers that live in Africa that are giving talks in Asia. And so they’re like, “You guys are awesome.” So we don’t have to do a lot of stuff. We don’t have to pay airfare, we don’t have to negotiate booking a hotel for them. The writer doesn’t have to take a lot of time out of their life, and they can do everything virtually.

So check out the website and see what’s been done for other books, and you’ll know, you’ll have a good idea of what’s going to be done for your book. And you can Google how much those things cost and try and figure out how much people are investing into your book, if that’s the energy you’re bringing. If that’s the energy you’re bringing, we’re probably not the right press for you because we want people excited about being published. We don’t want people dictating how we launch their books. So that was one query, the demanding query, and we covered the ‘dropping a name I don’t know’ query.

There’s another type of query that’s really strange to me and that’s the lying query; when everything a person says about themselves is a lie. And that is so confusing to me in today’s day and age. One person put in a complete lie about how many LinkedIn followers they had, which I thought was really strange. And the only reason it caught my eye is because they said LinkedIn, and I was like, “Why would that matter? This isn’t a business book, this is a fiction book,” because we don’t publish non-fiction. And it was a complete fabrication and I’m wondering, did they think I wouldn’t check LinkedIn?

And I do check everyone’s social media because I don’t want to publish a racist, I don’t want to publish a homophobic person, I don’t want to publish someone… an author that’s going to be problematic for me, personally, and any of my identities or any of our readers’ identities. I don’t want to publish authors that are putting negativity out there in the world. I don’t want an author that’s just getting… engaging in nothing but Twitter wars. I don’t care if the author has depression or mental health issues. Doesn’t bother me; I don’t discriminate in that way. But if someone’s making fun of mental health issues, I have a problem with that. And I’ll be really honest; if you voted for Trump in either election, we are not the right press for you.

And so I do go on and checks people’s social medias because I want to publish people with my same political beliefs. And you can say that that’s biased, and you can say that that’s discriminatory, and it is not, and it’s not against the law. And so you could say, “That’s discrimination. It’s against the law. I’m going to sue you. And that’s why you’re not publishing my book.” And I’ll say to you, “How can you prove that?” “Well, because you said that on this podcast; I voted for Trump, and therefore you’re not going to publish me.” And you can just look in the United States, a lot of people’s books didn’t get published because of shenanigans and things that went on politically. So putting your political beliefs in your query, I actually think it’s a good idea. Being like, “Hey, this is who I am politically,” and save everybody a lot of time. I would love if you would start doing that. That’s never going to catch on, I know that, but don’t put any lies.

And please, please do not say you have a previous bestseller. And please do not tell me you have 10 books published. It is so easy, come on now. Goodreads, Amazon. Are you kidding me? Google yourself, and if something you’re going to put in your query Google proves it to be a lie, don’t put it in your query. And my whole thing is, why are you building yourself up in this way? Shouldn’t your book speak for itself? That’s what I don’t get. Your other books, not to be rude, I don’t care. I really, I don’t care, because I’m not publishing your other books, I’m publishing this book. Now, if this book is number two in a series, I’m not going to publish number two in a series. And don’t lie to me and say it’s the first book in this series, because I’ll find out because your book one has already been published. I’m not going to publish number two in a series. I’m not going to publish someone who’s lied in the query. It’s just not going to happen.

And I’m not interested in your other books, publications, or your other deals with other publishers, because then again my mind starts wondering, why are you coming to us? You have this relationship with this other publisher. Why are you coming to us? And here’s the thing. If you have three books coming out in 2021, I don’t want to publish your fourth book in 2021. You are saturating the market. And it is one, two books at most per year, with at least nine months in between, to have any sort of impact on the market. So if you’re publishing three books in 2021, you have saturated the market. Unless they’re completely different books, like one book is kink, one book is YA, and one book is a picture book, then you’re not saturating the market with your name. They’re all very distinct books.

But if you have three books on kink and then you’re pitching me another book on kink, why would you want four books on kink out in the same year? You’re competing with yourself, and you’re splitting your audience. And I’ve had authors tell me, “No, you don’t understand. I’m not splitting my audience because of XYZ.” And I’m like, “I do this for a living, okay? I actually have training and education in this.” That was part of what I was doing in the four years leading up to this, was educating myself on how to publish.

So the other thing that I really do not enjoy at all in query letters is just really bizarre, biographical information. Like how long you’ve been married, how many kids you have, how much you love your partner, what you’re currently doing for a living. I’ve never understood why people advise putting that in. But you don’t put your political affiliations, and that’s so strange to me. What I would love is if somebody would put their identity and their pronouns in that little bio part, more so than how much you love your partner. I would just really love to hear… please, include your pronouns. Please, include your political leanings. Please, read our website and know that we don’t publish erotica and know that we don’t publish faith-based books. And so that should tell you some things about us as a publishing house.

And then look at the books that we published, and don’t just name-drop the book. Like, “Because you published this book, you should publish mine,” and the two books are completely unrelated. So the book that everyone loves to reference is Not My Ruckus, and I don’t know what they think from reading the blurb and the title, and I don’t even know if they’ve read the blurb. But then they pick something up, like happy and upbeat, and I’m like, “You did not read Not My Ruckus. It is not happy and upbeat.” Or they reference Gracie & Zeus, which is a romantic-comedy-meet-cozy-mystery, and they’re pitching fiction and fantasy. And I’m like, “Why didn’t you reference Drōmfrangil? It’s fantasy.” Like, “Come on, now. You just went to our website and Gracie & Zeus is the one that’s on the cover because this is their time to shine and this is their promotion cycle. Just click Books. Click Books. All the covers are there. Click Books.”

So I’ve gone over everything that I don’t like. Now I’m going to say what I do like. I like a short query, for one. I like when people include their pronouns and their identity information; that makes me really happy. And I like when the information included in the query is actually related to the book. I like a summary of the book; a two-paragraph summary. And I read one query, and of all the queries we’ve gotten, just being real here, there’s only been one that has led to me requesting a manuscript. And all they sent was their query, and it was beautiful. I wish I could just print… put their query on the website and say, “This is how you query.” I think I might ask them if I can do it, because it is stunning. But I don’t know if they want their secret sauce out there in the world like that, so I’ll have to ask them because their query was stunning. I think after the book comes out, it’ll make more sense because you can read their query and then look at their book.

But I think that’s kind of unfair because it’s like calling everybody else out because I don’t put their queries up. And then I had a really interesting query. So one of our authors is a different… via us. We knew… they didn’t query us, we queried them. “Please give us a buck,” when we were first starting out. And then as we started getting other queries, if someone has a fantasy book or a non fantasy book, for me, if it’s a cool sounding world, I’m like, “I’m so into that.” And we’ve had other publishers write query letters to us for other books, and we’ve actually signed the author from the publication recommending the book to us. And we appreciate that; that’s just a huge compliment. So yeah, that was query letters. And I guess it was just like a big therapy session for me, just venting about all the queries I don’t like.

And if we’re 15 letters in of me saying no, it doesn’t matter why I’m saying no. Take the no. I had someone, seriously, 15 exchanges. And if you’re listening to this podcast, know I will never publish you because that was so unpleasant for me. I had to say “no” literally 15 times for the person to be like, “Okay, you’re not publishing my book.” And I had to become more and more emphatic and I don’t like to do negative rejections at all, because rejection hurts. Even when it’s wrapped in candy and generosity and compliments, it still hurts. So I don’t want to beat anyone up but I feel like, at that point I’m being abused and my time, my kindness is being taken advantage of. And yeah, I don’t think I’ll ever do 15 exchanges again but this person, I was emphatically no and they just kept writing back. And then I had to say, “I will never, ever,” and it was just a really blunt no. And that’s not who I am. That’s not who we want to be as a press.

So the long and short of it is, have a short query, make sure it’s related to your book. And your bio, don’t talk about being married because I don’t care. Talk about who you are as a person. And let me know something real about you, and be authentic, which is a lot to ask. Or just say, “I listened to your episode on querying, so I’m not going to send you a query but I did send you 50 pages.” And I will be like, “Muah. Masterpiece.” That will be my favorite query letter ever. It will replace my current favorite, because that’ll say, “Hey, I’m listening to the podcast, I’m doing research on your press, and I really want to work with you.” So seriously, literally, all you have to do is, “Hey, Cinnabar Moth Pub. Listened to your podcast episode on querying. I’ve attached 50 pages,” and I will be like, “Thank you!” Because then everybody on the team will read 50 pages, and I won’t be the only one being like, “But you’ve got to get 10 more pages in. It’s super awesome. It’s super awesome.”

So thank you so much, all my beautiful moths. And again, you could be any kind of moth you want to be, even if that moth is a butterfly. But I’m not Mariah Carey and I’m not stealing her thing. Thank you so much for listening. And sorry if I sounded like a jerk, but queries put me through it. I don’t like them at all. And next week we’ll be interviewing, hopefully… I’m not sure because I haven’t confirmed yet one of our narrators, so I’m super excited about this. Y’all know, if you follow us on social media on Cinnabar Moth on Twitter, you know how much I love our narrators. They are amazing humans. So hopefully next week we’ll be doing one of our narrators. If not, we will be interviewing an author, and I don’t know which one yet because it’s not set up. So, talk to you next week. Thank you for listening. Bye.