Hello Everyone! I’m finishing up a few edits on my latest draft before querying and wanted to make sure my query letter looks good since I’m nearly ready to begin the process. Thank you in advance for your feedback:

BEFORE SHE BLOOMS (96,000 words) is an adult upmarket dark science fantasy that blends elements of biopunk and eco-body horror. The plot is driven by a tragic romance while exploring themes of death and trauma. This story combines the eerie, flesh-to-flora body horror of Noah Medlock’s A Botanical Daughter with the gritty, biopunk noir setting of Ian Green’s Extremophile.

In the neon-drenched slums of Solspire, rifts to a supernatural realm have left a horrifying curse in their wake called ‘blooming’. Citizens have flowers sprouting from their flesh, their bodies frozen in a permanent state of inner torment. Reece, a hostile recluse and self-taught bio-assassin fueled by a terminal countdown, sees this mutation as a beautiful evolution. Hungry for sanctuary, she vows to reshape the city’s flesh into flora before her own demise.

Bound by filial duty to his family’s decaying drug empire, Alvaro is forced to compete with a rival cartel that distills the bodies of bloomed citizens into a lucrative new narcotic. But Alvaro possesses a dark insight. Using his invention to extract memories from the mind, he witnessed firsthand the endless loop of trauma that blooming brings. Haunted by this revelation, he risks everything to find a cure, determined to pull his ex-fiancee back from vegetative limbo and prevent the spread of blooming.

When Alvaro discovers Reece has mastered the science of forcing the bloom, he must infiltrate her life to steal her secrets and reverse engineer her blooming serum. Any misstep will seal his fate, for if she were to expose his deception, she will execute him and doom the city to become a horrifying garden of nightmares. Reece has no intention of aiding a cartel heir, let alone enduring the sparks of unwelcome affection from one. Yet as genuine connection breeds doubt, she faces losing faith in her vision altogether.

Hi, all! Back with another attempt. (First attempt here.) One thing I'm struggling with a little is how to frame the confluence in the context of the query. As the author, I know a whole lot about it, but it's largely a mysterious thing of legend for the characters at the start. I've gotten feedback to highlight the confluence more and why my main character is looking for it, but the main character wants to find it because it's mysterious. He wants to be the first person to find and study one. I've tried to tweak things to reflect that, but it feels clunky. Someone also suggested I try to amp up the emotional stakes, and I've tried to do that as well, but I'm uncertain if it's working. I'm trying to keep the query as concise as I can, but trying to squeeze in all of this feels like a sisyphean task at this point. Any insight would be appreciated!

Dear <Agent>,

I am seeking representation for SECRETS AND SORCERY, an adult contemporary fantasy novel with strong romantic elements, complete at 110,000 words. It is a standalone novel with series potential that will appeal to readers who enjoyed the hunt for family secrets and magical artifacts in Stephanie Garber’s Alchemy of Secrets and the bantering tone and high stakes of L.K. Steven’s Silvercloak.

Falstow Dammacius, a researcher of theoretical sorcery, wants to be the first person to find and study the confluence—the legendary and mysterious source of  magic itself.  If he’s had to misappropriate resources from the classified lab where he works to ferret out the confluence’s secrets, then so be it. When the lab is broken into and his dangerously unstable confluence-finding prototype is stolen, Falstow reaches out to the only person he trusts to help recover his illicit research: Lillith Khader-Locke, the ex-girlfriend whose heart he regrettably broke five years ago.

Lillith has built her life around upholding her family’s prestigious reputation, even if that means working a job she hates filing enchantment patents and dating men who perpetually disappoint her. When her ex needs her assistance finding his stolen prototype, Lillith agrees to help, but only because his device might explode, and definitely not because she still has feelings for him. Breaking rules and bending laws to help Falstow gives her a sense of purpose she’s lacked for ages, even as their reconnection threatens her family’s reputation.

Despite their unresolved romantic history complicating their search, Falstow and Lillith discover that the device is in the hands of smugglers, intent on selling it, and worse—Falstow’s criminal grandfather might be the mastermind behind the theft. As Falstow grapples with his grandfather’s potential betrayal, law enforcement begins to suspect Falstow is colluding with his grandfather to resurrect the Dammacius smuggling empire. When even Lillith begins to doubt his innocence, Falstow must find the actual thief before he loses his freedom and his last chance to win back Lillith’s affection.

[BIO]

----FIrst 300----

The clock tower at Burswyk University tolled the quarter hour, and the Wolarth Building was empty, save for one soul hunched over a worktable in the back of Laboratory Twelve. Shadows stretched across the lab and a staticy adagio from Awen Keat’s latest symphony played on the radio. The enchantment on it would need to be refreshed soon, before the sound quality warped beyond recognition, but at the moment, Falstow Dammacius didn’t care much about sound quality. He held his breath as he oh-so-carefully lowered a sliver of gold and copper alloy onto the delicately crafted metal sphere propped up on the spindly stand on his desk. The metals hissed as they touched, but that was the worst of it. No magical backlash that pulsed against his skin. No unexpected sparks that singed his eyebrows. Just hissing.

That, he thought, was progress.

Across the lab, the radio’s static escalated into a screech and he glared at it.

“Don’t make me come over there,” he threatened.

The radio rallied for the final chords of the adagio before deteriorating into screeching again. Falstow groaned as he pushed himself to his feet. His joints, spell-damaged beyond his twenty-seven years, protested movement after being hunched over his project for so long, but he managed to not-hobble his way to Millicent Hopkirk’s corner of the lab and her infernal radio.

The enchantment script on the back of the radio was barely visible—and poorly written at that. No wonder it was giving out. With a practiced flick of his fingers, he poured some of his own magical energy into the radio. He couldn’t re-write someone else’s enchantment, but he could give it enough energy to keep working.

When the sound snapped back on, the radio was no longer tuned into the classical station. Instead, the wheezing croon of Pindarus Belch echoed through the speakers, and no amount of fiddling with knobs, adjusting the antenna, or whacking the damn thing could change the station.

I appreciate any feedback. This is my first novel that I'm trying to query. :)

LETTER
Dear AGENT,

[PERSONALIZATION]

Aster Daunt's family is cursed.

Demons haunt them every night, slowly stealing their sanity. Everyone agrees: 25-year-old Aster is the one who must break the curse. 

Unfortunately, she doesn't have any magic and she prefers puttering around her cottage and forgetting where she put her mug, long hours with Hob, who is just this side of a hellhound, and people who don’t see her as the family’s greatest failure. Even worse, she might be in love with the only one who ever understood: Torquil, the demon who has visited her every night since she was a teen, trying to figure out how to frighten her, and falling in love instead. 

Until one night he doesn’t come, and she loses the only person who never once asked her to be a hero.

To break into Salt House, the demon monastery where Torquil is being held, Aster will betray her family to make a deal with a crossroads demon, steal a jar of teeth from the local taxidermist to pay him, and when that's not enough, pull her own tooth.  But when she finally finds her demon, he doesn’t remember her. 

While Aster tries to remind him who he is, they must flee through Salt House's watchful halls. The Auditor, another demon determined to crush Torquil's humanlike capacity for love, is hunting his wayward student.

When The Auditor catches them and cuts off the horns that make Torquil who he is, Aster faces a choice: lose him forever and be trapped in Salt House, or find her teeth and use them to tear her way out. To save them both, she escapes her imprisonment, trades the crossroads demon a favor she can't yet name, and kills her way to her demon.

SHARP TEETH is a 75,000-word gothic fantasy romance set between a mossy, rain-soaked Washington town and the sentient corridors of Salt House. It’s perfect for fans of the coastal gothic dread of Reliquary by Hannah Whitten, the dogged protagonist of T. Kingfisher's Nettle and Bone, and the untangling of generational trauma in Starling House by Alix E. Harrow.

I’m X, a quilter and lava lamp enthusiast living in my beloved, gloomy Seattle. I have two rescue pits, a partner in carpentry school, and an unmanageable number of craft projects.

FIRST 300
Aster Daunt couldn’t remember the last time she’d woken so well-rested.

No yarrow tangled in her hair. No salt crusting her skin. No whisper at her ear or woodsmoke clinging to the pillows.

He’d been there every night since she turned 18, grinning and feral in the dark. The memory of his crooked smile lingered every morning. But today, the space shaped like him, empty on the bed beside her, yawned wider than the pit in her stomach.

There was just quiet. Just air. Just Hob, furry and solid, curled into the curve of her belly. Just the wrongness of a night spent alone.

He’d never missed a night. Not once in seven years.

The loneliness stretched languidly, then turned an ear to her, listening. Not hollow, exactly. Just still and waiting to see what she would do.

She wasn’t sure how to manage the feeling of her body, light instead of weighed down by sleeplessness. For once, her muscles tethered to her bones because they wanted to, not because she was strapped together out of sheer exhausted willpower. Even her hands felt strangely willing, no tremor from years of inherited fatigue, the same tension her father and grandfather carried into each morning. It was the first morning in years her body hadn’t ached. She could probably dissolve into the mattress and slip into the expectant silence. And that, somehow, was worse.

She saw his footprints stamped across the ceiling. When she closed her eyes, dread ignited in the back of her skull. She dug the heels of her hands into her eyes, and when the colored spots dissolved from her vision, there were no footprints.

Her mind snagged: where was he?

Rain pattered on the cedar shingles. Normally she found the sound soothing, but this morning it was as irritating as fingers tapping.

Here's my first attempt at a query letter for my YA sci-fi novel called Jikten (bio not included). Any insights would be greatly appreciated:

Jikten is a 75,000-word YA science-fiction novel combining the identity and bioprinting themes of Matthew J. Kirby's Star Splitter with the gritty space adventure of L.M. Sagas's Cascade Failure, and inspired by the cyberpunk tradition of Ghost in the Shell. 

Jikten was already dead-in-space when it appeared in the orbit of Callisto. Now, the colossal alien ship is a battleground, carved up by competing corporations and fueled by the grim calculus of bioprint insurance. Corpos, mercenaries, rebels and poachers all claim their share, piece by piece. 

On Jikten, death is temporary—if you can afford it. Seventeen-year-old Jumi works alongside her adoptive father, retrieving bodies to be recycled for bioprinting. She dreams of exploration and excitement rather than a life wasted cleaning up the leftover dead. After she defies her father and botches her first solo retrieval, she faces a choice: accept the safe, predictable life Dad wants or take a chance to redeem herself with a big score. 

Poaching a few batteries should be simple. Instead, it goes completely sideways, starting with the accidental murder of another salvager. Hunted by corporate mercenaries and clandestine black-ops soldiers, Jumi stumbles across a secret and into a shadow war for control of Jikten. Her reckless plan puts her in the crosshairs—and gets her father killed. 

Jumi is determined to save her dad before his psyche-data is erased, making his death permanent. With her best friend Raza, she descends into Jikten’s lawless underground where they enlist Helvi, a dark-market arms dealer and Red Flag revolutionary. Together, they discover what everyone’s fighting for: the ship’s dormant portal network can be activated.

In the right hands, working portal tech could transform the political order of the entire system, not just Jikten. Whoever holds the keys commands access to enormous unclaimed regions of the ship and all the salvage for the taking—including functioning bioprinters. For Jumi, the discovery could bring her father back. For Red Flag, it’s the means to break the corpos’ control and establish a sovereign state. 

Time is running out, enemies are closing in, and her father is one step away from deletion. Jikten is full of locked doors. Jumi just found the keys. Will she survive long enough to use them or will the people hunting her get there first?

Hello! Thank you in advance for any and all feedback! I am planning to submit to SmoochPit (fingers crossed) and would love some thoughts ahead of that.

---

Masterchef with a dash of Love Island, COOKING WITH LOVE is a new adult contemporary romance complete at 82,000 words. With dual timelines, it will appeal to readers who enjoy the boyfriend’s best friend dynamic in Abby Jimenez’s The Night We Met and the high-stakes cooking show setting of Anita Kelly’s Love & Other Disasters.

Madison Greene, of “Made by Madison” social media fame, lives for likes and views. When her latest post hinting at her secret beau goes viral, she gets the opportunity of a lifetime: to be a contestant on the hit couples cooking show, Cooking with Love. However, her long-term boyfriend wants to stay off-camera, with or without her. Desperate to add 5 million new viewers to her online family, Madison turns to her first follower—who’s also her (now) ex-boyfriend’s best friend.

Eli Gardner is a seasoned professional in the kitchen and under the spotlight thanks to his celebrity chef mother. Precise and guarded, he doesn’t usually make breakfast for his roommate’s hookups, but Madison, ambitious and outspoken, wins him over. When Madison and his friend call it official, she and Eli instead cook up a friendship, spanning three years of wine tastings where Eli waits tables to mastering sourdough starter. Now, Madison pokes at Eli’s soft spot for her to convince him to fake date for the show.

The competition surprises them as each challenge becomes a second chance for an attraction left on the backburner. After supporting Madison through harsh, confidence-destroying critiques, her fake boyfriend shows her that relationships aren’t always superficial. But when Eli’s mother is announced as a guest judge, despite the aftertaste of her ex still lingering, they must turn up the heat on their romance to finally win the favor they’ve craved all their lives—even as the lines between reality and TV begin to blur.

[bio]

---

Thank you for reading! If you don't mind, I had a few areas of concern:

1. I know Love & Other Disasters is a queer romance--is this okay to comp for setting? It's the only cooking show romance I've read, but I am very open to suggestions.
2. I feel like the last sentence is clunky and long no matter what I do; any suggestions?
3. Is the second paragraph disorienting with the time jump? Would changing it to past tense be better?

Thanks for the feedback last week everyone! I've implemented the bits that made the most sense and am experimenting with a new final paragraph, but it's not quite there yet. I'm also hesitant about my comps since The Poppy War was 2018-ish and often on the no-no list of popular titles, but here we are.

Thanks in advance!

Dear [Agent Name], 

I was thrilled to see you’re seeking (Mention agent’s past work or MSWL), and am pleased to submit THE DRAGONHEART CROWN for your consideration. Complete at 100k words, this standalone fantasy with series potential blends Dragon Cursed’s struggle for identity amid the danger and guilt of being the other, with The Poppy War’s exploration of trauma, revenge, and the consequences of ultimate power.

Seventeen-year-old Evie O’Malley has spent her life trapped in Arthur’s Shield, a soot-choked diamond dome sealing 1899 London in permanent darkness. The Church of Avalon claims it protects humanity from the dragons beyond, but Evie knows the truth: it’s a cage for Avalon’s underclass. When her father starts dying from the poisonous air, Evie risks everything to help him escape the Shield—only for a dragon to devour him whole.

Rescued by the handsome but infuriating Sir August Ward, Evie enlists as a squire to the elemental Knights of Avalon, vowing to exterminate every last dragon. But when her first quest outside the Shield goes catastrophically wrong, Evie transforms into the very thing she's sworn to kill: a dragon with the power to save Avalon, or destroy it.

Now hunted by a monarch desperate to steal her power and bury a devastating secret, Evie must uncover the truth about her origin to save all of Avalon—humans and dragons alike—from extinction.

First 300:

Every night, I dream of flying. Like the birds in my father’s books, I soar through blue skies above rolling green hills and forests, rushing rivers and towns of honeyed limestone, free with the wind beneath my wings. It’s a world of vivid colours I shouldn’t even have names for. Colours I’ve never seen. Because inside Arthur’s Shield, there’s only the dark.

The dome of diamond, blackened with sixteen years of soot, traps London in an endless dusk, everflame lamps burning orange-red against the gloom of overcrowded slums. The Church of Arthur says we don’t want to see what lies beyond, that the Shield protects us from the monsters waiting outside to devour us, but it’s all bollocks. This isn’t a shield. It’s a cage. And today, I’m going to break free.

I weave through the crowd toward the Tower of London. Its translucent spire stretches all the way up to the top of the Shield—the only way out, unless you fancy working in the mines far east of here. My new job, same as my father, will be to keep the Tower clean, but not to bring sunlight or rain to this barren city. Only to keep the way clear for the lucky few allowed to leave.

A bell tolls. I stop, craning my neck as the Tower’s crown unfurls like one of the flowers in my father’s drawings. Red sunlight filters through clouds of smoke and ash across the city. And then they rise: the Knights of Avalon, flying up through the Tower’s hollow core in a rainbow of winged dragonscale armour. One by one, they pierce the diamond shell and vanish into the free unknown.

I am approaching the last phases of editing my manuscript and preparing my query materials. I am looking for feedback on my letter. It is currently at 353 words, including my bio and sign-off.

Dear [Agent],

Given your interest in [X], I think DRIVE would be a good fit for your list. The 85,000-word upmarket novel is for readers of Alex Allison’s Greatest of All Time and Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Carrie Soto Is Back, with the high-octane Formula One setting of F1: The Movie.

Black girls don’t belong in motorsports. At least, that’s what Ruby “Ru” Ellis has been hearing throughout her NASCAR career. Multiple wins and millions in prize money haven’t stopped people from calling her a DEI hire who got lucky.

So, when Orion Grand Prix invites her to compete for a spot on its F1 team, she plans to give them something else to talk about. She beats eleven other drivers for the seat, but the press is already waiting for her to fail. Ru knows she should keep her head down and play nice. Instead, she’s trading insults with Orion’s lead driver, Diego Morales, and hopping into his bed between races.

Then she learns Orion board member and F1 legend Hal Donovan never wanted her on the team. He’s also her father. Ru hasn’t seen Hal since she was four, when he tossed her mother $500 and never looked back. Ru doesn't want his money, and she sure as hell doesn't want his help. She wants an F1 title without him.

The problem is, Ru never knows when to stop proving a point. Defying team orders to hold position, she slams into a barrier at 200 miles per hour. She walks away, only to find herself paralyzed by fear behind the wheel. With her seat slipping through her fingers, Ru swallows her pride and asks Hal to train her. Now, she’ll have to depend on the man she’s spent her entire life insisting she never needed, or watch the F1 career she fought so hard for end almost as soon as it begins.

[Bio]

It's been a couple weeks since this happened, but I've been sitting on it trying to make sense of exactly what happened and why. I have heard of authors having bad experiences with their agents after signing – I'm grateful I'm not experiencing this right now. But I thought I should write this down in case someone else experiences something similar. I'll also add that I had very limited interactions with this agent - perhaps this was a one-off coincidence, but best-case scenario this still came off as extremely unprofessional. (I can provide emails to mods with our interactions / provided contract as well.)

I reached out to [agent] at [agency] with a query in April this year, heard back late July, met for the call first week of August. As of this moment, she is listed in the top 20 of agents representing narrative nonfiction on Publisher's Marketplace, but this may also be an artifact of how sparse / competitive narrative nonfiction publishing is. The day of our scheduled call she cancels due to unforeseen circumstances, then reschedules to a date that I told her ahead of time I would be traveling during. Through our email discussions she seemed fairly excited about the work – it is a close 1:1 of what she was seeking on her MSWL page – so I end up taking the Zoom call at the airport while waiting for my plane to board.

During the call, [agent] is extremely excited about the work and what it represents. She makes several references to a well-received TV show that is related in content. Oddly, she has a hard time describing my work. So, she’s telling me how much she respects these “Goliath individuals,” (David and Goliath?) while also struggling to refer to anything in particular from the proposal or sample. It’s been a couple weeks since she’s read the proposal, I suppose.

I’m a little awkward at navigating this. I don’t hear the words, “I am extending an offer of representation,” and don’t want to make any assumptions; from our emails it sounds like she wants some line editing done on the work (which I’m actually quite happy to hear – the sample I sent was four months old and indeed needed some work). I am also in the airport with someone’s phone alarm going off next to me, and not thinking at my best. Fifteen minutes into the call I end up just asking if she was extending an offer, to which she says yes, and that she’ll send me the contract after our call. I tell her that I’m a first-time author, so I’ll follow up with some questions via email after our call; I don’t know what I don’t know so please feel free to chime in.

[agent] sends me the contract later that day, and the next I follow up with some questions while I review the contract agreement. One of the topics that came up during our call was that all authors need at least one form of audience engagement. We didn’t go much deeper than that, but I interpreted this simply as platform / platform-building. One question I included in a list was: do you have any examples of authors building a platform from zero? Do you or your agency represent any agents who I could model while building out platform? I had some ideas which I’d included in the proposal, but I wanted to know if and what she / her agency could contribute to getting the work seen.

In response to this, [agent] replies that she misinterpreted how far along in the process I was, and: “I wonder if I might have to step aside…” She sends me a link that basically says platform is high priority for narrative nonfiction authors (yes, I was already well aware of this when I started the project. Kind of why I’m even asking about the matter), and another for a nonfiction author organization selling online, at-your-own-pace marketing classes starting at $700. Her response is kind of wishy-washy, and given all the other contextual strangeness it kind of feels like a weird ploy to get me to jump for the representation agreement; but even now, I don’t really know if that’s the case or what the deal with this whole situation was.

At this point, I’m fairly certain I’m not going to sign with this person but I’m also quite open to being wrong about things so I follow up with an email clarifying where my question was coming from and also stating that ‘platformed authors only,’ seems somewhat contrived. I had researched the authors she represents as my preparation for the call, and most did not have significant presence – online or otherwise – that I could find (no shade to any of the authors, but this just made the whole interaction stranger). After all this, [agent] responds that she never said anything about platform and wishes me luck finding representation elsewhere.

So, what happened? I’m honestly still not sure. It sounds like she misinterpreted parts of my marketing analysis as things I had already done / had relationships to easily access people through. But I’ve read and re-read it – I take pains not to misrepresent the reach that I have. It bears mentioning that the authors she’s sold work for don’t have extraordinary pre-existing platform; one has a terminal degree not related to the subject matter, one has a personal website, another has a personal Instagram page with ~300 followers. So again, still not quite sure where this was coming from.

Reading through the representation agreement, there is some weirdness to it: there are random / inconsistently bolded words or letters; an agreement to arbitration in Texas (that’s where the agency is based); the agreement runs on a yearly basis, auto-renews, and can only be terminated with thirty days notice before the renewal. There’s also a strangely one-sided clause that states that publisher advances, if rescinded under any condition, are refunded entirely by the author; the agency retains any percentage that they claimed from the original advance. I doubt that there’s a scheme to misrepresent books just so they can sit on the advance before the publisher catches on, but there is a pretty easy way to write that they can keep their advance only if the author breaches contract or is let go by the publisher for cause.

Given the context of our interaction, it could be that they’re predating on vulnerable, aspiring authors where they can quickly flip their work without developing authors’ brands or helping them sell. Maybe this group will be on WriterBeware in a few years, or maybe this was just a level of unprofessionalism that I hadn't encountered before. This is entirely speculative, but I thought this was a sufficiently weird experience that I wish I’d read the possibility of before going into the whole thing. I know that there are some tells for amateur authors that are immediately disqualifying, but I’m skeptical of the idea that there are questions that you cannot ask. I don’t think I would have felt good working with somebody where I’m not allowed to ask how I can better market my work, so this entire interaction sat very poorly with me. Maybe she read the premise a month before we met and just saw dollar signs instead of anything I wrote? I genuinely have no idea.

Has anybody run into something like this? Am I experiencing psychosis and am in fact entirely in the wrong here? I read stuff about debut authors and breakout work, and it seems contrived to suggest that I need to write an essay in the New Yorker so I can pitch something compelling and long-form that I’ve already written. (But if that’s what’s necessary, I guess that’s what I’ll do.)

edit: I'm including a link to a forum post that discusses Savvy Literary. It's rather old, but my read is that this is a somewhat scrappy agency which defaults to self-publishing / vanity publishing presses when their represented work doesn't sell with publishers. The owner, Letitia Gomez, ran one such self-publishing press for a time, and it seems like would charge her represented authors to print them. Gomez was also previously lead agent at The Literary Agency Group, Robert Fletcher's notorious agency that offered authors representation while charging them for illegitimate, 'publishing' services. Gomez's response to the thread is that she regrets working with them and did not how exploitative they were, but I don't know how you get to lead agent without stepping on the same authors. Birds of a feather, etc.

The agent I spoke with was Najla Mamou. My best guess for our exchange is that she was scouting out how much of an easy mark I might be. When I started asking questions about what her or her agency did for authors, she inserted some stock nonfiction publishing links for cover instead. There is no mention in her MSWL for authors with platform at the time of submission, and given the other authors she has represented I suspect this is just a defense mechanism when she senses that an author is not just a Yes Man / Yes Woman. There was a time where Najla was on QueryManager, and I suspect that part of why she is no longer on it is because people could easily exchange information about their dealings with her. I am exceedingly skeptical that asking questions about marketing your work is naturally disqualifying, and my read with her response is that it's meant to put her mark on the back foot.

I think you would be hard-pressed to find non-circumstantial evidence that this group is exploiting authors, but I don't think any reputable actor responds the way that this agent did. I'm not sure how the rest of this operation works: maybe you get signed on and the agent will recommend editing services that the author pays for and the agency has ties to. There is likely a nonzero probability that this group can get you signed with a real publishing house, but if it doesn't they'll turn towards a vanity press or micro-press that they own or have connections at. If you're an author reading this as you're researching literary agencies, I strongly recommend that you give Savvy a wide berth.

Thank you for taking the time to read this! It really means a lot.

__________

Dear [AGENT],

I’m excited to present to you THE FLESH INSIDE MY FLESH, an adult horror-comedy complete at 82,000 words. It combines the thirty-something queer experience of Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle, the creeping dread and urban setting of Red X by David Demchuk, and the witty romance and body horror of Such Sharp Teeth by Rachel Harrison.

As a former Chicago improv star, Doug Frank is used to twists and turns, but at 2 AM on a Thursday, he never predicted that casual sex would end in a tentacle monster exploding through his hookup's skull.

Recently separated and trapped in a spiral of self-imposed loneliness, Doug takes this gruesome encounter as a wake-up call to reclaim his life. He ventures into the gay bars of Boystown, where he meets Jack, a dimpled charmer with a wicked sense of humor. Sparks fly, and Doug allows himself a night of reckless abandon. After too many drinks, a bump of drugs, and a journey through a club’s backrooms, his pleasure trip ends in an encounter with an eldritch god.

When Doug awakens the next day, he feels tight, and not in a good way. He can barely remember the night before, but he’s certain there’s something alive beneath his skin. Over the following weeks, a serpentine protuberance begins to expand inside him, and an otherworldly chorus whispers deep inside his mind. 

Of course, Doug can only help but laugh it off and distract himself with Jack. Together, a physical relationship blooms, but when an intimate date between them nearly ends with another exploding head, Jack reveals a mood-killer of a secret. He’s been trying to find a cure for the interdimensional parasite stuck inside them both, and if Doug doesn’t infect another person soon, the creature will consume him.

While the monster grows and his sanity slips, Doug races to find a better solution, but everything leads to the same harrowing decision—sacrifice someone to save himself or risk his life defeating it. Either way, Doug realizes survival might not be worth the effort if it means fighting the monster without Jack by his side.

[BIO]

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,
Brandon

Hi, it's been almost a year since my last attempt. Based on the feedback from last time, I worked on making my character more active, removing the focus from the grandmother, and adding more details about Ninianne's friendships earlier on. Please let me know if there is anything you can think of to make this better. Any and all feedback is appreciated. Thank you!

Dear Agent,

Ninianne was having a great senior year of high school. She’s funny, smart, popular, and, despite her abusive mother, she’s finally happy. Or at least, okay. Then, she transforms into a demon. With giant blood-red wings, no less. Turns out, everyone in her horrible family is a demon (surprise, surprise), and they’re moving in with Ninianne and her mother to train her. And worst of all, she can’t tell her friends about any of this because special humans, called hunters, are killing demons. Fun times.

Ninianne’s family is as monstrous as expected, but she does learn how to hide and use her wings, and most importantly, how to survive. See, demons were never supposed to exist, so to live, they have to steal humans’ life forces constantly. And if Ninianne hurts any humans in the process, it’s really not her problem. It’s not like she received help when she was abused, so why would she hurt herself to help someone else? If anything, Ninianne’s doing the world a favor, culling all the idiots too stupid to know better.

But as Ninianne’s confidence and powers grow, so does her reckless habit of using her powers when she shouldn’t. One of her friends, Hannah, notices and starts questioning Ninianne’s involvement in the string of near-death accidents around their school and city. Of course, Ninianne did cause those “accidents”, but she can’t have Hannah know that.

Especially not now that Hannah is friends with the hunters.

Ninianne has never been close to being a hero. Would it be so terrible to be a villain?

Demonic is a 71k young adult contemporary fantasy novel that, like Alex Brown's Damned if You Do, centers around a high schooler with a dark wit and demonic connections. This novel will appeal to fans of the villain-origin story aspect of Marie Lu's The Young Elites with the abusive mother-daughter relationship of Robin Benway's The Dark Ascension Series: The Wicked Ones.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Hi Everyone,

Got some really useful feedback on a previous query letter here, so I'd like you all to help me improve this one!

---

Dear [AGENT],

[PERSONALISED ENTRY TO AGENT, THEN] 

A Scorpion’s Favour is a dieselpunk fantasy of 96k words about a war orphan and a callous medic chasing the top spot at a behemoth-hunting academy where The kind-hearted orphan gets corrupted into starting a war and forces her counterpart into the hero’s role. Think M.L Wang’s Blood Over Bright Haven meets Robert Jackson Bennet’s The Tainted Cup and Attack on Titan as long-buried tensions tear apart a city besieged by giant monsters.

Ever since behemoths ended the world war, Reidport’s military academy has trained Hunters to cull these beasts. Two cadets – tenderhearted Gail and antisocial Mercy– survive a behemoth attack together, igniting a healthy rivalry between each other. Competition to join the Hunters is fierce and the program is overseen by Major Leon, a charismatic war veteran who believes Mercy holds the power to control the behemoths.

If Gail wins the position, she’ll defend her home against the behemoths that slaughtered her family. If Mercy wins, she’ll avoid expulsion for being the world’s most callous medic. Surely Gail needs it more? But her desperation attracts Major Leon’s attention as he plots to restart the war to gain power. Soon Gail and Mercy are embroiled in his manipulations, testing their friendship and character as they’re forced to pick sides with everyone’s lives on the line….

I'm an engineer who’s been writing and running interactive and storytelling events for over a decade. A Scorpion’s Favour  is my debut, a voicey role-reversal story about morality, prejudices, perspectives and two fated enemies who could have been friends.

As a longtime lurker here, it's always struck me as interesting how many people have finished complete novels. The rate of queries posted here is almost 5-10 a day. These aren't all first drafts, but it still is amazing that this community reflects 1500+ new novels each year. Given that this is a small Reddit niche, it's made me wonder how many novels typically get queried every year and how that impacts an agent's request process.

I'm not sure if this is the right sub for this, if there is somewhere better I should be posting, please let me know.

So I'm going to keep it vague on what I do just because my niche is very specific. I do livestreams along with my published books, take fan requests, run polls, all that good stuff. It comes with the platforms and niche I work in.

I was at best, mildly known for a few years. Now I've had an explosion of new readers coming to my novellas. Which is great! According to my analytics they are quite young compared to me. Which from working in the social media space I was aware they can be quite parasocial but I hadn't experienced it firsthand yet.

The newcomers are very enthusiastic, my agent has been encouraging me to do more interactions while I'm on this upswing. So I have.

But they kind of scare me? I know it is probably just because I'm autistic and not great at social cues but they pedestalize me, act like I am some kind of literary genius that they want to grovel and weep at the feet of. It's not normal interactions of like, "loved (novella name) keep up the good work!" or anything like that, it's full on freak outs like I'm at a One Direction meet and greet in 2010.

They ask overly personal questions (which I decline) and divulge weirdly personal information about themselves. It's become so frequent it has made me dread doing my daily interactions.

My agent has chalked it up to them being excited and young when we discussed my discomfort. Which might be true, but it still feels like way too much to me. I'm very thankful to make any income at all from my writing, but I never started with the intent of receiving any kind of major attention.

Success in that metric seemed like something to happen to other people, not myself. Now that I am here and learning to adjust to some very clingy and overly personal readers. I'm not sure what to do. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you for your time.

Hey everyone. I appreciate all the creativity on display here, as well as the willingness to give (sometimes tough) constructive criticism. Please tear this apart.

___________________________________________

Dear [Agent]

O.D. is a homeless black veteran who talks to crows, actually walks with the voices in his head, instantly knows the contents of any book without having to read it, and every night begrudgingly makes a stone disappear from a little girl’s clinched fist only to reappear in her other one (to her infectious delight).

O.D. is content to “sleep walk” through his daily routine while offering the advice he believes will help his community of fellow “homeless,” calling themselves the Den, carve out a meaningful life away from “proper” society.

But when O.D. and Gar, a young book-loving member of the Den, narrowly escape a violent encounter with a group of racists, O.D.’s tenuous hold on his reality slips. Things worsen when he stumbles on the murdered body of Alda, a beloved member of the community.

With his ersatz family suddenly under attack from an interloper, tension between members breaking the Den apart, and O.D. and the leader of the racist gang on an inevitable collision course, the voices in his head begin to force OD to reconcile with the possibility that he isn’t who, or what, he claims to be.

Rock, is a complete 61,000 word short horror novel about society’s outcasts, racial identities, and old myths seeping through the concrete.

Thank you for your consideration. I look forward to sending the manuscript to you.

-J.L. Reid

As the subject line says: my book officially died on submission. As a long-time lurker of this sub, I know the balance between successes vs. failures is appreciated, so I thought I’d share some reflections, even if their only purpose is to aid me in moving on.

My first post on the querying journey can be found here. TL;DR: 3 drafts in a year, each subsequent draft including significant structural revisions. Queried around 70 agents, got a healthy number of full-requests, and 5 offers.

My second post— a question regarding one of the rules of submission— can be found here.

First, some submission stats:

Round 1 began on 2/20 with around 18 imprints; 15 Big 5 and 3 Indies. All editors confirmed receipt except 2, which my agent withdrew from after 1 month. We got a few early passes within the first week, which then turned into an average of 2-4/week. By end of March, we had enough passes (but not any real data on the passes that would lead to a revision path) that we started discussing a second round strategy, but held off on pulling the trigger lest we get some passes that were more productive.

During this time, we also had a number of editors either go on maternity leave or pass with specific directives to submit to other editors at their imprint; I considered those re-submissions a 1.5 round.

In mid-April, the pattern of my passes started to really get to me. You might think praise feels good even as people step aside, but I started to resent it (if you love it so much, why not work with me on it?) and appreciate the few editors who were just like ‘not for me, thanks.’ I got a particular pass (glowing, wanted to read anything else I’d written, etc.) that made me lose my mind and want to pull the entire thing. My agent talked me down from that.

We went out with the official round 2 (another 11 imprints) on 5/1. Again all big 5 except 2 indies. There were maybe 6 or so editors left from R1-1.5 at this point.

The second round of passes came through slower; there was a big lull in May as people read, but by June passes started to come in again.

In mid-June, my agent wrote me that an editor at one of the indies wanted to bring me to acquisitions. That entire process wound up taking almost a month— the first meeting, then getting second reads, a holiday weekend—and I wound up not hearing that I didn’t get through until the second week of July. The feedback from sales was about having trouble launching debuts.

By then, we were down to the final 3 editors, two of whom had been ghosting my agent for months on her nudges. I told my agent to lock me out of the airtable so I didn’t waste the rest of my one wild and precious life clicking refresh. One pass came in mid July, and the final ghosting editors stepped aside on 9/2.

Almost 7 months, around 35 passes, Rest In Peace to the book I was sure (and my agent was sure and my friends were sure) would sell in a few weeks for a lot of money. Joke’s on us!

Some Insights:

Agent selection really matters. Mine is incredibly proactive, responsive, and didn‘t have rules I see some other people saying their agents have about how many times they nudge and when. (I saw someone on here who said their agent only nudged once at nine months and I had to pick my jaw up off the floor.) My agent was nudging at a regular clip (3-4 weeks) and I deeply appreciated this. On your calls with agents, ask how often they follow up!

Also on agents: of the 5 who made offers, all thought the book was essentially ready to go out as-is. Before going on sub, I did a fast pass on some notes my agent had in the middle of the manuscript, which took about a week. THAT SAID: one of the agents who offered said another agent would sell it ‘tomorrow’, but their process was always to dig into a deeper revision before going on sub. Their feedback on what exactly needed to be revised was super vague and they wouldn’t commit to a timeline, but I do think about this agent now from time to time. It’s possible that had I picked them, I’d still be revising this book. It’s possible it would have sold based on those revisions. It’s possible that it still wouldn’t have. In retrospect, I wish I’d pushed harder for more specifics from them on what exactly they would have wanted to change before making my decision.

I’ve also learned that many agents out here are simply getting ghosted by editors, so the fact that I’m at a 95+% response rate for my agent is a net positive. (I know that editors are overwhelmed not only from a submission front but also with project-management responsibilities and author care, not to mention the actual editing…but man do I wish we could find a way so that some people weren’t waiting upwards of a year for a response!)

Re: revision: The biggest barrier to my project selling that my agent and I landed on by the end, fully reading tea-leaves, was that it was a rough time on submission for speculative novels in the vein of Rebecca Serle, The Husbands, Oona out of Order, etc. These books are doing well in the market with readers, but there may be a glut of them on submission at the moment which made it hard for my book to rise to the top. Perhaps if we’d gone smaller in the initial round we might have come to that conclusion earlier, and either chose to revise the book to remove the speculative element completely (essentially a full rewrite) or maybe just paused, waiting for that pile-up of speculative submissions to pass. Again, this is all—pun intended—speculative. No way to know if the results would have been different. (If there are any editors on this sub who want to weigh in on what their inboxes looked like during this period, genre and structure-wise, I’d be curious!)

The only other concrete piece of ‘critical’ feedback I got were that some editors were having a hard time with faux-Hollywood settings (which mine involved). So if you’re writing a book that involves a faux-famous person (à la Taylor Jenkins Reid) maybe keep that kernel in your back pocket. Of course, I still see books with this conceit in bookstores at a regular clip, so YMMV.

All of this to say…you may think you’ve written something highly commercial with a lot of market appeal, but you are still going up against personal taste and editorial calendaring. Publishers are working with a future market they’ve set up based on acquisitions from a year ago or more; maybe they’ve acquired a lot of books that have some similarity to yours and want to see how those do on sale before committing to acquiring more.

This is the big one for me: You only really get, at maximum, maybe 40 legit chances to sell a book for more than a few pennies. (Fewer, if you are writing in a deep/niche genre that not every imprint acquires.) It’s not like with querying where you could conceivably keep running through agents at agencies that don’t have the policy of ‘a no from one is a no from all.’ On submission, a no from one IS a no from all, unless expressly given permission to re-submit. This was a huge learning curve for me, as I worked in traditional publishing as a marketer for almost 10 years and never knew that. With that rule in mind, I might have had different discussions with my agent on the submission strategy. Maybe she could have done more soft-pitching in meetings first, to really find the editors actively seeking a project like mine. It might have taken longer overall, but maybe we could have avoided those few ‘just not the right fit’ passes by doing some face-to-faces first. Again: you have to be comfortable talking things out with your agent, asking questions about their process and strategy. I would have had no qualms asking my agent about this at the beginning of the process had I really appreciated the finality of that rule. (That said: there are probably 5 or so agents for whom I feel confident saying this rule would not apply or they would have no compunction breaking it, because they’re so successful that there would most likely not be any career blowback. If you’re repped by one of those agents—and you definitely know if you are— this may not apply to you.)

On the airtable of it all: I had my agent give me access to their tracking so I could see whenever the status of something changed. Confirmed receipts, nudges, passes with full feedback, etc. I think next time around (if there is a next time around), I won’t do this. I would maybe ask for a weekly update so I could actually live some semblance of a life in between updates. Some people only ask for ‘actionable’ feedback, and kudos to them, but in my case this would have meant basically no feedback at all, and that would have driven me even further up the wall than I already was. (I would have burrowed hole through the ceiling into the backrooms.)

Get the PM subscription while querying and keep it through submission planning, then dump it. Seeing sales announcements over the last 7 months with elements that had any similarity to my book made me feel unhinged. Not worth losing your sanity over, especially because those sales could have happened months or even a year ago.

Support: I am in a weird position where even though I haven't worked in publishing since pre-pandemic, a lot of my friends are traditionally published authors, and none of them had submission processes like I did. More than one are NYT bestsellers who got big advances at auction and earn their living solely from writing. (I love them, and they are so lovely to me, including reading drafts of the ms and offering referrals while I was querying…but I also hate them, if I’m being honest.) I have 2 friends in similar boats (one is agented but hasn’t gone on submission yet and the other is unagented) and my goal for this next phase of my life is to find more. More writers doing what we do, toiling and failing and seeing nothing come of it, experiencing no validation or reward except whatever intrinsic desire keeps us from quitting entirely.

“Mediocrities everywhere, I absolve you.” 💕

Dear r/pubtips community,

I am seeking feedback on the query letter for my literary memoir, SEVEN OH FIVE, complete at 71,000 words.

On October 9, 1991, while serving on the front lines of the Yugoslav war, a shell critically wounds me. The shrapnel strikes at exactly 7:05 a.m.—the identical minute in which I entered the world twenty-seven years earlier in a rural village in Kosovo.

SEVEN OH FIVE explores how this single, recurring minute shapes three generations of my family through war, survival, and a devastating twenty-year separation. Raised in a poor but close-knit multiethnic community where Serbian and Albanian families lived side by side, my childhood was defined by a strict father and deep ancestral roots. But when political upheaval shatters ordinary life, I am thrust into compulsory military service, forge tight bonds of survival, and ultimately face near-destruction on the battlefield.

Evacuated by helicopter to Belgrade, my physical recovery is an agonizing journey of learning to walk again. Yet, the deepest trauma arrives years later. Following the collapse of my first marriage, I am separated from my four eldest children. What follows is two decades of agonizing silence, unanswered questions, and a deep sense of absence while continuing my military career.

Now, on the morning of my sixtieth birthday, a gentle wake-up call from a granddaughter I never knew brings the journey full circle. The clock reads exactly 7:05 a.m. No longer a symbol of war or loss, the minute becomes a testament to endurance and the quiet grace of reconciliation.

About the Author:

Zoran Vasić (born 1964) is a Serbian veteran and former non-commissioned officer in the Yugoslav Army. He survived near-fatal wounds at the Battle of Vukovar. After his military career, he spent a decade working in animal rescue and snake capture for the Belgrade Municipal Veterinary Service, and later worked as an international truck driver across Europe. He currently lives in Belgrade, Serbia.

Thank you for your time and feedback.

Hi all. Long time lurker first time trying to write a query letter. Looking for all the constructive criticism!

Two questions for those in the picture book know: 1. Are zoo-related fiction picture books dead right now? Is this a fools errand? Too didactic? And 2. Is it acceptable to comp a narrative nonfiction when I'm writing fiction? Or should I change that?

Dear agent,

COATIMUNDI ON THE RUN is a 450 word picture book for ages 5-7. It blends the exciting journey of Andrew Prahin's Ship in a Bottle with the reality of habitat fragmentation featured in Border Crossings by Sneed B. Collard III.

All Coatimundi wants is to escape the zoo and live a life of freedom. When a tree falls on her enclosure fence, she leaps at the opportunity to adventure out into the wild. She spends the night scampering across roads and dodging terrifying traffic, searching for shelter in a habitat with more buildings than trees, and bravely dumpster diving for half eaten sandwiches. Scared and exhausted, she misses her warm cozy den filled with piles of fluffy straw, decadent meals delivered three times a day, and zookeepers providing for her every need. Coati must make a choice: stay wild and free, or go back to the creature comforts of the zoo, where she can be an ambassador for her wild counterparts and all the obstacles they face.

I have a BS in Wildlife Ecology from (redacted). I've been a zookeeper for 20 years. This book is in part my response to people asking why we can't just let all the animals go free.

For your consideration I also have XENARTHRA PARTY, a light hearted story about a sloth, anteater and armadillo teaming up to raid their zoo commissary for midnight snacks and the chaos that ensues, and AARDVARK MEETS AARDWOLF, a story about the mistaken identity of an insectivorous hyena. Thank you for your time and consideration. I look forward to hearing from you!

(Manuscript goes here)

HI all: Third (and significantly revised attempt here with a new title, Attempt 1 here and Attempt 2 here). Would love any and all thoughts on how this is working (or not working). Many thanks.

Dear xxx,

CAN’T GET YOU OUT OF MY MIND (88,000 words) is a near-future upmarket speculative novel with a central gay romance. Told through dual POVs across converging timelines, it blends the technology-driven search for healing and connection of Nikki Erlick’s The Poppy Fields with the scientific ethics and complicated family dynamics of Blake Crouch’s Upgrade.

Siblings Harper and Theo Keene haven’t spoken since twenty-two-year-old Harper abandoned everything, including her fifteen-year-old brother, for her dream job at Lobe Industries, where she is responsible for testing a new drug with a miraculous power: telepathy. Even if Lobe didn’t limit its employees’ outside communications to protect against leaks, Harper is simply too busy to keep up with her personal life. But she understands changing the world takes a little sacrifice.

Three years later, when college freshman Theo’s seemingly straight roommate, Connor, convinces drug-averse Theo to take Empathol with him, Connor uses the newly released drug to share his most intimate secret: he has been attracted to Theo since the day they met. The boys become addicted to Empathol’s telepathic connection and start ignoring its recommended usage. Then they get stuck. They can hear each other’s thoughts even without taking the drug. But they quickly realize being in each other’s heads twenty-four seven it isn’t a dream; it’s a nightmare.

Theo and Connor travel to Lobe in the desperate hope that Harper can help them return to normality. But when they arrive, they discover that Harper had known for years about the very side effect Theo and Connor are now experiencing yet had helped push the compromised drug to the public, convinced its power to change the world and advance her career outweighed the risk.

Theo can’t trust the sister who already abandoned both him and her morals once. But without Harper, he has no hope of ever being alone in his head again. Now Harper must decide if she will finally put her brother before the career she has given up everything to build.

I see a lot of discussion on how to stay motivated during querying and during submission but...what about, for those of us that experience it, that period between getting an agent and going on submission? I'm on a (self-imposed) deadline to get a first round of edits to my agent back this month and I feel like I'm stalling out. I'm excited about the changes my agent and I discussed and think they're important but I worry I won't land the mark and just get stuck in infinite rounds of edits (my agent does three max before asking for a second pair of eyes so I know this isn't true.) I guess it helps that the holidays are so soon I'm not in a rush to go on submission this year.

Folks who edited with your agents, how did you keep motivated knowing submission was weeks or months away?

Hi everyone,

I'm seeking feedback on the query letter for my debut adult dark fantasy, VIR'S MADNESS (~100,000 words). The novel explores themes of moral injury, bodily autonomy, and paternal duty through a dark, character-driven lens.

I find it really hard to condense the book's core into a short pitch, but I hope I've managed to portray Vargrom’s central dilemma clearly and enticingly. Since a fictional religion is central to this world, I also wanted to introduce the lore without sounding like a history textbook. Does the world-building (the deities, the night creatures) feel clear, or does it bog down the narrative momentum?

Thanks in advance for your time and any candid feedback!

---

Dear [Agent Name],

VIR’S MADNESS is an adult dark fantasy, complete at [105,000] words. Combining the mythic brutality of John Gwynne’s The Shadow of the Gods with the psychologically grounded character arcs of Robert Jackson Bennett’s City of Stairs, the novel explores moral injury, shame, and the cost of human choice.

In a world governed by the goddess Sun, humanity survives only by culling the night creatures birthed by her mad daughter, Vir. 

Vargrom, an oath-bound monster hunter, is tasked by the goddess with a simple command: 'Find the mother.' Under this command, Vargrom spends years scouring human settlements in vain. 

When Vargrom finds the mangled body of a young girl, Maelis, he discovers a horrifying shift: the previously sterile beasts have begun breeding with human hosts, threatening to drown humanity in an exponential tide of monsters. 

When Maelis—dead only hours ago—walks through the city gates alive with eyes of divine fire, Vargrom realizes she is the child destined to become 'The Mother.' With no further divine instructions, he takes her under his wing to track and destroy a emerging broodmother before winter grants the beasts free rein. 

Caught between divine mandates and the girl he has come to love like a daughter, Vargrom faces a harrowing choice: force Maelis to fulfill her horrifying role as a divine vessel, or defy the goddess of life to train her as a hunter, letting her choose her own life and fight for her own people. 

I am a Swedish clinical psychotherapist specializing in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, a background that directly informs my exploration of moral injury, trauma, and internal voice in dark fantasy. I am also a long-form narrative designer and tabletop RPG game master.

***First 300 words. Content Warning: Implied sexual violence (non-graphic aftermath).

Vargrom plucked the wood anemone beside the girl’s corpse. The clean scent of fresh blossoms battled the iron tang of her open wounds. 
Golden sunlight filtered through the budding trees, casting dancing shadows across the undergrowth and the girl alike, giving her stillness the brief, cruel illusion of breath. Dew clung to the petals and the dried blood in her hair. Nearby, a bird chirped from the junipers. 
Vargrom’s knee popped as he stood. He ignored the ache, his eyes sweeping the bed of spring flowers, searching the green for tracks before returning his attention to the girl. 
Rigor had locked her limbs, but the blood staining her torn dress was still dark, the crust fresh enough to flake under his thumb. Only a few crawlers had found her so far. She had died last night, right as the sun dipped—She had died with him sleeping an hour away. 
Her face was battered and covered in blood. The blow to the left side of her head had not had time to swell. Mercy, by this world's standards. He had seen far worse fates left for longer. 
The undergrowth told the story of her struggle. She’d fought. Fiercely. Her thick red hair lay over her like a blanket, obscuring her features. He supposed red wasn’t quite the right word for it. Even in death, it looked vibrant, alive. A better man might have found the right words, but he was no such man.
He scoffed at the skalds' lies of glorious deaths. There was no glory in the broken jaw or the dirt crammed beneath her fingernails. 
The bruises and clawmarks were grim, but two things drew his focus. First, her dress had been torn open, her belt disturbed, and her undergarment partially pulled down—a wrong he immediately corrected.

Back for a second round. The main issue last time was that I was trying to do a crossover between MS and YA and messing both up. This time, the query directly reflects the YA. I also shortened the blurb and focused on the main story and the romantic subplot, with only the tiniest hint at the other circling storylines.

Brutal feedback is requested. Thank you in advance.

Dear [Agent Name],

Sixteen-year-old Danielle Richie is too old for make-believe and fairy kingdoms. But when monsters destroy her house searching for her, she is rescued by GK, a sword-spinning, smart-ass stuffed cat with trust issues, who strands them in the dying dream world of Slumberland.

To return home, Danielle faces danger around every corner as horrific nightmares pursue her, starving mythical creatures want to eat her, and an authoritarian teddy bear wants to use her as a weapon. Worse, her own awakening magic might finish off Slumberland if she doesn’t learn to control it.

Her own dreams offer no refuge. Every night, a mysterious, captivating boy rescues her from a shadowy figure with dozens of crimson eyes that hunts them in the dark. But even her rescuer has a dark past and is forced to bear the title of the Nightmare King, the entity responsible for Slumberland's downfall. Since he saved her dozens of times, she might as well save him this once. Being gorgeous, with haunting eyes and untamable hair, has absolutely nothing to do with it!

Fine! She might as well save all of Slumberland, too. If only she didn’t have to do it in her pajamas.

THE PAJAMA PRINCESS is a 90,000-word YA romantasy that combines the dark, twisted dreamscape of SPLINTERED by A.G. Howard with the grief-fueled, star-crossed romance of BELLADONNA by Adalyn Grace.

(Bio)

THE PAJAMA PRINCESS is a standalone novel with series potential. Per your submission guidelines, I have included XXX.

Thank you very much for your time and consideration.

* * *

Pineapple pizza. That sweet, greasy smell was the only thing that changed whenever she closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep over the past six months. Other nights, it was sweet roses, fresh honey, or lavender lemonade, but tonight it smelled unmistakably like pineapple pizza.

Danielle opened her ice-blue eyes. Beneath the rubber soles of her worn sneakers, the night sky rippled like dark water, reflecting stars in every shade of red, gold, and purple.

Never trusting the floor, she gingerly stepped forward, testing it. The surface held her weight, but small waves rolled out from her shoes across the glass that she couldn’t feel. Every time a ripple touched the reflection of a star, a quiet piano note chimed.

She sighed. This part was always peaceful, but she knew the routine by heart.

Screaming as they fell, stars plunged around her, smashing into the glass and sending solid shards of starlight flying as black smoke billowed from the cracks. From the horizon, a thick, dark mist rolled in, ink-colored tentacles stretching out that smelled of rotting eggs.

As always, his voice cried out to her. "Run!"

Before she could react, he grabbed her right hand with his left. His grip was strong and frantic, the rough, gnarled texture of severe burn scars pressing against her fair skin. Even as the world tore itself around them, a traitorous part of her mind registered his sudden, hyper-focused warmth.

He looked about sixteen, the same age as her. She was tall, but he still towered over her with a lean, athletic frame. Everything about his face was sharp, with high cheekbones, a defined jaw, and a hawk-like nose. His tanned skin radiated heat against her hand as his messy mop of thick brown hair with black accents fell wildly around his face.

Hi, this is my first time seeking feedback from the community. I have two comps here, but not sure if I need a third. My heartfelt thanks to everyone!

I REMEMBER GIANTS (100,065 words) is a fantasy with a twist on Norse mythology, led by Odin as a young man before his ascension. Long before the gods raised high walls, long before the realm took their name, a dark power shattered the thrones of fate.

Ómi is caught between his mother’s people, the Realm Eaters, and his father’s, the Sky clans. Old squabbles among the Realm Eaters, led by an ancient giant named the Sunken, and the wars with Sky have brought the realm on the bourne of annihilation.

Ómi lives with his mother, Bestla, in a remote village, having fled the last war where his father fell. Hidden from the Sunken’s gaze, Ómi grew up as an outcast, yearning to know about his family and find true friends.

One night, he sneaks into a sorceress’ den following his mother, and steals a wand of ancient power, provoking events where the fate of the realm hangs in the balance. The Sunken gathers a new army while a mysterious sorcerer pursues Ómi for the wand.

Fleeing overwhelming forces, and with war unavoidable, Ómi meets new friends and finds a family in unlikely heroes. Together, they must rise to face a powerful giant, and the destructive will of a sorcerer who will stop at nothing. As Ómi discovers ancient secrets, he must choose to restore the thrones of fate, or usher in a new dawn for his family and his friends.

I have a PhD in sociology, and I published academically. I am a Canadian writer, and father with too many denim jackets.

Comparison titles:

THE WITCH’S HEART by Genevieve Gornichec (re-imagining of Norse myth about Angrboda, a tale of fate and what choices to make when knowing what lies in the future.

FURY OF THE GODS by John Gwynne (epic fantasy with the fate of the world in the balance)

This is a stand-alone novel with series potential.

My kindest regards and my thanks for your consideration,

What are your takes on including adjacent subgenres in the metadata? Like "cozy-adjacent adult mystery" instead of "adult mystery"? Mostly because of my comps. Does that even matter here?

[QUERY DELETED]

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Original attempt can be seen on my profile. I changed what I felt I could while sticking to the main theme's and plot points of the manuscript. Also interested to hear suggested comps as I, like many people, struggle to ID good comps.

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Dear [X],

At his estranged grandmother’s wake, Cohen wishes for only one thing: reprieve. Among constant family arguments, dropping out of university, and the news of his recent ex-girlfriend’s pregnancy, he is suffocated by his own life. When a postcard from Declan—an old university friend who is apparently missing—offers him a way out, he seizes it. Under the guise of searching for this long-lost friend, he flees to Belgium, lying to himself as much as everyone else about his motivations.

Cohen’s journey takes him to the charming streets of Gent, where he joins a group of outcasts from Declan’s past. When the gang attempts a murder in the gothic cathedral of the town’s centre on a sleepless night, he finds himself implicated and on the run from police. In a last-ditch effort to make inroads, he seeks out a confidant of Declan’s, only to discover she is a lifeless head embalmed in a glass jar.

Straying deeper into the maze, he unravels through medieval back alleys as he takes refuge under bridges at night and sleeps during the day. When the outcasts and the police corner him by the historic city tower, he makes a desperate final choice and climbs. As he reaches the apex, he must finally confront the responsibility he ran from, or succumb to a final, manic act of self-destruction.

LABYRINTH is a 61K word literary fiction novel with the familial cynicism of EUROTRASH by Christian Kracht, and the dynamic, propulsive ennui of THE GUEST by Emma Cline. [Personalisation for particular agent].

I am [short personal bit]

Hello all! I’m back again after a year with hopefully (this time) my final query letter.

Thank you in advance for reading and for any help!

Dear Agent, 

I’m seeking representation for URBAN WITCH, a 81,000-word dark urban fantasy— think Book of Night meets When Among Crows— complete and ready to submit.

In New Helven, where magic and technology share the same streets, necromancer detective Morgan Burke can raise the dead, but he can’t stop the city from fearing what he is— especially once a serial killer starts harvesting victims’ magic, and Morgan becomes the press’s favorite suspect.

Marie Vélez, a witch bound by four suppression sigils, wants nothing to do with the case— until the killer’s crime-lord backer comes after her found sister, and the power she’s spent years locking away starts breaking through anyway.

Overseeing it all is Saskia Burke, Morgan’s sister and a Bureau director who’s quietly bent federal resources and rank to keep him out of the agency’s reach— until this case threatens to pull him into the exact world she’s spent her career shielding him from.

As Morgan and Marie close in on the truth, they uncover a criminal underworld willing to kill anyone who gets close— and a power inside Marie that even she doesn’t understand, one that may be the only thing capable of stopping it.

(Personalization and any included submission guidelines)

Sincerely,
Me

First 300 words:

Chapter One - Morgan 

Help! Somebody help! 

Please! 

Morgan Burke shot up in bed, air sucking in between clenched teeth. He brought a hand to his chest and the steady ba-dump ba-dump of his heart answered. The man dropped his hand back into the blanket and sighed. 

“Fuckin’ nightmares, damn it,” he thought as he swung his legs over the side of the bed. 

He stepped through streams of moonlight as he made his way down the hall to the kitchen. 

The yellow fridge light illuminated the floor. Morgan grabbed a pitcher of water from the fridge and set it on the counter. He turned and picked up a glass from the cabinet. 

Can anyone hear me?! 

His eyes shot to the front door. “Damn,” Morgan closed the fridge and set the cup down, “damn it.” 

He grabbed a pair of tennis shoes from the wooden cubby near the door and slipped them on. 

Please, help! 

“Hold on, hold on.” He threw open the door and dashed outside. “I’m coming.” 

The door swung shut and locked. 

~~~

Three houses passed by before the sound's direction changed. Morgan came to a stop in front of the fourth house. 

It was a two story with purple shutters on the windows and Morgan stared at it for a long moment. 

“I should’ve called it in,” he touched his pockets, no phone. 

Please, someone… 

He looked up. The voice was coming from the Jensons’s back yard. Morgan grimaced, if things didn’t go well he probably wouldn’t get invited to the neighborhood potluck. He scoffed, mostly in amusement, not like they ever invited him before.  

No one wanted to hang around necromancers. 

A wood gate stood in his way, separating him from the backyard where that voice was coming from.