Query letter – Jaye Em Edgecliff

Here in the wee small hours of another Hellish, Georgian, what-is-this-spring-nonsense-of-which-you-speak day I have finished writing Ready or Not!

I’m thrilled, and exhausted. This one was a lot harder to write than Love or Lust was, and I’m worried that Book 3 will be just as difficult. Book 4 I’ve very clear thoughts on, and am quite looking forward to.

Still, I think I have a handle on things. I’m going to take a bit of a rest, take time to type up what I’ve written, then let that marinate while I get some editing done to Love or Lust I discovered a particular scene needs after learning a bit more about playing guitar. When I’m done I’m going to get to work on book 3 before I start editing Ready or Not. It makes sense in the way my mind works, but I doubt very much I could explain it.

In other news I’m still waiting on word back from over half the agents I sent queries to. I suppose that’s a good thing, in that it means they’re (probably) giving my query some serious thinking about, but at the same time I kind of wish I could get one who reads the query and is all immediately “This is great! I would love to represent this story!” Sadly the opposite has been true, as three rejections came within 48hrs of being submitted. Ah well, this is a hard story to sell to mainstream, I’d probably have 6 agents offering me contracts if it were Færie Patrol I was sending out. YA Urban Fantasy is being seen as instant cash in the bank by the agents and publishers right now; everyone wants the next Twilight.

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The Dragon Carnivale Cover reveal and Giveaways (beanieboo78.wordpress.com)

My God! I suddenly have a ridiculous pile of agents and agencies that look promising.

I will spend this week sending out queries. I do still plan to put a deadline to be accepted or self publish. Love or Lust will either be on the hands of an agent, being shopped to publishers, or it will be self published by the start of June.

I wish to give the agencies a reasonable time with which to respond, but I also don’t wish to sit idly on a completed story. I’m sure there are plausibly hundreds of relevant agents out there, if I can but find their names and sites. I will play that game to a point. When I could only find two promising looking agents, I didn’t like giving up so I looked – cautiously as I don’t need an agent, but I looked. I found a whopping three more. Today Google’s results were utterly different! Two pages of results I’d never found before before I decided to stop and get ready for bed! These were the top matches!

So I will continue to selectively query, but to a much deeper and broader pool (a wise thing, I should think, as it give the agent idea a far fairer chance). After this week, though, no more searching. This new pool of results gives me a more comfortably sized list, and looking much longer risks pushing my June deadline in order to give the agents fair time to respond.

Good night.
Wish me luck.