Are you not having the success you’d like with your query letters? Take a look at The Renegade Writer’s Query Letters That Rock book, by Linda Formichelli and Diana Burrell. They share 24 actual query letters that sold (in most cases, for big bucks, I’m sure), and include the writer’s own thoughts about what went into producing the query. Even more helpful is the fact that Formichelli and Burrell included comments from the assigning editor in each case. But wait! There’s more! (really, I’m not a copywriter) – the authors also include an extensive and helpful Q&A section.
To be honest, some of these queries I would have turned down myself, were I the editor receiving them. Maybe that’s why I’m not an editor.
Here’s an excerpt, though, from one of my favorite queries in the book:
“The elderly man with a white sun-protection strip over his nose walked up to me from behind. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘but would you mind taking our picture?’ I didn’t want to. I was tired from skiing all morning, and lying in the snow with the sun on my face was everything I needed right then. Certainly anyone else in the crowd at the top of Vail’s Blue Sky Basin would’ve been capable. For some reason, he chose me.
When I obliged, he took out his camera and signaled to his three friends to come over. He extended an old, 35mm film handheld that seemed a decade past its time. I sized up the men as they gathered. They looked far too old to be skiing, yet there they were nonetheless, with modern equipment and, apparently – if they’d gotten this far – mountain know-how. I noticed a small white sticker at the tips of each of their skis. A closer glance revealed the 10th Mountain Division logo and their names printed below it. Immediately I knew: these were World War II veterans, and ski pioneers of an endangered kind.
I snapped a few photos of them as they flashed weathered yet genuine smiles. Then I asked them the same question I’ve asked every person I come across with ties to the 10th Mountain Division: ‘Does the name Snuffy O’Neil ring a bell to any of you?’ One of the men, who had already begun to walk away, swung his head around like he’d heard a ghost. ‘Snuffy O’Neil, did you say?’ Before I could answer him, the man who’d approached me initially repeated the name. ‘Snuffy O’Neil.’ He shook his head and paused for a moment, collecting his thoughts. ‘Why, I haven’t heard that name since before the war ended.’ My mind raced as I did the math. Sixty-one years. And yet he remembered.
I told them that Snuffy O’Neil was my grandfather. He died six months before my twin brother and I were born. Aside from relatives, I had never met anyone who knew him. They were the first.”
Maybe I’m just a sucker for these out-of-the-blue stories, but I found myself wiping a bit of moisture from my eyes and certainly wanted to hear more about this serendipitous meeting and what came of it.
Apparently the editor felt much the same. Here are some of her excerpted comments:
“We love it when someone pitches us a story that sounds like a magazine article versus a newspaper story. We see too much newspaper writing in queries – they are heavily quote-driven to show reporting, but not fully developed into analysis and commentary, or developed in a cinematic sense to ’show versus tell.’ Because we’re a magazine, we can take a first-person viewpoint, a very personal story, and tie it into a larger story or our state’s history that readers are curious about. Devon’s story is the kind of story we love.”
I’ve yet to see the finished article, but if you have access to back issues of the magazine 5280 (subtitled “Denver’s Mile High Magazine”), it was printed in the December 2006 issue.
