I have to confess; I had no idea how difficult it was going to decide who to send the novel to.  That being said, it was even more difficult to boil down the story into an appealing query letter.  I know my story.  I wrote it, edited it, polished it, and when that was done, I had a professional editor work on it.

 

I opened a new Word Document.

 

I looked at it.

 

Hm.

 

Yeah.

 

Nothing.

 

The blank page has never scared me.  It has endless possibilities and I have total confidence I can fill it.  That was not the case for writing the query letter.  I decided to tackle this like any other project.

 

The first step was to do research on query letters for erotica novels.  I found very little that was relevant and useful.  I was not surprised.  I expanded my search and got the general terms of what the query letter needs.  The templates left me cold.  I was not inspired by the templates at all.  They felt too mechanical.

 

My interpretation and feelings do not represent the facts, but they make the point. Start with book title.  Follow that with the word count and genre.  Then a nice summary of the book. I looked at it.  It did not inspire me.

 

I went back to doing searches and found a plethora of examples of actual letters.  None followed the one I first found.  The one key point is “hook them early.”  If you fail to do that, it appears to me, that they’ll toss the query into the trash and move to the next one. This thought bothered me.  The only point against me is that when I look at resumes at work, if the person did not catch my attention quickly, I set it aside for later reading.

 

In a resume formatting is critical.  I have to assume that for Query letters it is the same.  I went back to my resume writing skills.  I’ve had to write many cover letters and send a large number in my forty-year career.  It has become second nature.  That’s the key problem, isn’t it?  I know how to write a good resume cover letter; but this is my first query.

 

Back to research.

 

I wrote the novel in fifty weeks.  I maybe averaged five hours a week.  I fretted over sitting down and writing the query letter for several weeks.  Always finding an excuse.  Research was both my friend and my excuse to procrastinate.  On May 25^th, I decided that by the end of the month I’d send out a query letter.  I circled it on my wall calendar by my desk.  A goal, a challenge, and a constant reminder.

 

I hated my calendar for that interminable week.  It kept saying to me: You now have one less day.

 

The end of May came around and I still did not have my query letter done.  I sat down, looked at the blank screen and typed.  I was not sure what I was writing, but it had to start.  I reached out to a friend from Twitter (@KPasithea) and she looked it over.  She had great pointers and surprised me by returning the letter in very short order.

 

I created what now was my fifth or sixth draft.  I don’t do drafts as a rule.  I type, I read, I edit, and I send.  This query letter was in my head, and it would not let my thoughts go.  I printed all of them.  Laid them side by side and read through them.  They were like the resumes I read at work.  If I had to make an effort to read it, I tossed it.  If someone with my level of interest in my novel could not read the query letter, then the editor would not either.

 

How many survived you ask?  None.

I got a cup of coffee, I paced as I drank, and started with what sounded like the stupidest question ever:  What’s my novel about?  I’m not sure if that’s just me, or if anyone else goes through this.  I could not tell myself in less than ten paces what my story was about.

 

That’s a problem.

 

How to get employed 101.  First have an elevator pitch.  Second, have a ten-pace expansion.  Third, have a sit-down speech ready.  I was failing at the first and second steps.  I did this for an hour and three cups of coffee.  It finally started to take shape and it was not what I told myself it was.

 

What’s my story about?  It’s about a second coming of age for near empty-nesters.

 

What???

I paced for an hour, and this is what I have?  It’s about Mike and Helen and their venturing into the hot wife lifestyle in the form of a confident Stag and a sexy Vixen.

 

Nope!

 

What do you mean, nope?  What the hell does that mean?  You wrote an erotic story about this couple testing the waters of openly sharing themselves.  Why did I not like any of this secondary comments?  Simple.  They are adjectives to the verb of the story.  They expand it.  They answer the: what, why, when and where, but they are not what the story is about.

 

I was stunned.

 

Do I write a query letter with that as the lead?  No, but it serves to put the story in perspective.  We typically think of coming of age as something we do in our late teens and early twenties.  It is not what we think of a couple married for twenty-seven year and are in their mid to late forties.  In the case of Mike and Helen though, they are having to do it all over again.  Their life, as they knew it, is done.  They now face the reality of Mike and Helen, alone together for the first time.

 

In their twenties they had children.  First it was a goal, then it was a reality.  The kids took their attention and stole moments to be together.  Now, every night they’d have to be together.  Every morning’s breakfast was for them.  The plans for the day are theirs and on one else.  Priorities changed.  Focus changed. Goals?  What about goals?

 

Now I had the idea of how to write the query letter.  Here’s a small part of the first section.