I've overhauled my nonfiction proposal somewhat -- mostly on my own, but I did finally, belatedly, receive comments from the nonfiction author's association, courtesy of lit agent Jennifer Chen Tran. Most of these were highlighter boxes around individual words and phrases with suggested changes, and I mostly didn't understand why the suggested versions were better than the original wording.

As with query letters and the entire querying process, it all comes across to me as paradoxical: "Please submit your description of your book in a format that exactly meets our expectations of how an author who writes successful books in today's market would do it, but we're not going to specify what our expectations are. Emphasize how your book is different from what's already out there, but show us how it fits conveniently into an existing niche in the established market. Be original. Don't try to hand us anything we don't already know how to market to publishers. Please take time to write us a personal query that shows you bothered to familiarize yourself with our interests and track record, and why you picked us as a literary agency, but also be aware that we look at hundreds of these things very rapidly and reject nearly every one of them, so strip it down to just the facts, ma'am."

I do not think I would enjoy being a literary agent. Maybe I'm wrong about that but it looks utterly dismal from the outside. I like finding a fascinating book that takes me somewhere unexpected, and it's no more likely to have been written in the last couple years than to have been written twenty or thirty years ago. I think I'd hate to have to plow through a gigantic slush pile of query letters and proposals and first three chapter excerpts, looking not merely for a gem that hits my sweet spot as a reader but also one that I can get some market-driven publisher to consider.

You familiar with Stephen King's book Misery? Where the main character is an author being held hostage by a demented fan of his own book series' main character, and she keeps him prisoner until he writes a sequel that she likes? Well, maybe there's a market for a horror tale in which a frustrated unpublished author kidnaps a literary agent and ties them to a chair and makes them read their manuscript...

ANYWAY, as of today, Within the Box now has been the subject of 265 query letters, of which 228 have resulted in rejections or 3-month timeouts. The remaining 37 are still outstanding and could theoretically result in some type of positive response. Nary a single nibble yet, not a request for additional chapters or a full or anything else.

For the sake of comparison, for my first book GenderQueer I sent forth 1474 query letters to lit agents before I switched to querying small independent presses and hybrid publishers instead. I did get some interested responses, although never got offered a lit agency contract.


For all the subscribers and fans and regular readers of my blog who wonder why my blogging pace has dropped off from the once-a-week schedule I maintained until around October of last year, I apologize. And to both of you, I should explain that I started this blog because of all the advice telling me that an author trying to get published, especially a nonfiction author, really needs a platform. Meaning a base of already-attentive audience members who would be likely to go out and purchase a book by that author if one were to be published. But I think I only have a certain threshold tolerance for how much I can write and push out into the world and watch it not being seen and read. And right now I'm querying and it is soul-destroying enough without also writing blog posts that nobody reads.

I left Twitter nearly a year ago, never was on TikTok or Instagram or any of those other social-media critters, and I'm increasingly tempted to leave Facebook. I just don't find the short-attention-span popup-notification world to overlap much with what I regard as communication.


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My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

I have started querying my third book, Within the Box, and I'm still seeking advance readers for reviews and feedback. It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.






Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

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"List some books that are similar to yours. (500 characters or less)" reads the query manager entry for both Kristin Nelson and Stephanie Rostan, two professional literary agents.

It's not explicitly required by all lit agents and publishers, but some folks advise including a "comp titles" section on any query letter.

I haven't tended to, but it was definitely in my formal proposal (which, in turn, is required by some lit agents and publishers for any nonficton queries, and memoirs are nonfiction), and I had a standalone Comparable Titles snippet I could include whenever it was a part of what was requested.

So now that I've generated at least a rough draft of my third book's query letter (see previous blog post), I've started work on assembling a list of other books that Within the Box has some important resemblance to.

"You may be intimidated or skeptical, thinking either that your idea has to be unique in order to pique their interest, or that your book needs to be similar to others, or else there won’t be an audience for it. The reality here, like with most things in life, is somewhere in the middle", says Kevin Anderson.

Yeah... I'm not aware of any other first-hand account of being in a rehab clinic that turns out to have similarly sinister overtones. Or a genderqueer person's narrative about having their inability to function well socially attributed to their drug-addled mental instabilities instead of pinned to marginalization and society's biases and attitudes. But let's see... books with a lot of internal thought-processing and which invoke a sense of a possibly unreliable narrator who may be more messed up than she thinks she is, in a place or in the care of people who are supposed to be taking care of folks but may be doing something a lot more evil...


Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh looks promising. It's a first person narrative from an unguessably different individual, one who seems sharp but perhaps damaged goods in some not fully explained way. Definitely an outsider. She's not institutionalized but works in one (a juvenile reformatory prison). A facility that is at least officially and nominally about doing good but pretty evidently, from the narrator's observation, isn't. A narrator who cares about her interactions with others and is vulnerable on a number of parameters, but not in the usual manner; she's an interesting mixture of impervious and insecure. And Eileen is even more self-immersive than Within the Box -- very little action and events have occurred in the first 60 pages.

Dennis Lehand's Shutter Island takes place in a high security forensic psychiatric hospital. The main character and his companion are federal marshals brought in because one of the committed inmates has gone missing. But readers learn pretty early on that the main character has some hidden agenda of his own involving a murderer who killed someone in his own family, a murderer committed to this same facility. And he may not be wrapped as tightly as he likes people to think. Something's totally up with the shrinks running the place, too. They're not playing honestly with the agents; the marshals don't believe the inmate could have escaped without assistance from at least some staff members, perhaps highly placed ones. And now, 50 pages or so in, I'm seeing signs that they may be doing conscious and deliberate things to manipulate their federal guests... or is it the narrator's paranoid imaginings?

I'm also 45 pages into A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay. The first person narrator is the younger sister of Natalie, a brilliant high school student who created entertaining stories but whose imaginings are going very dark and twisted. Natalie is clearly suffering -- she says so -- and her behaviors are impacting others in her family negatively, making her situation different from that of a person who may merely be perceived by others as deranged.

You get more of that from A. Mark Bedillion's Psychiatric Survivor. Or that's my expectation at any rate. I haven't started it yet, it just arrived in the mail. But it's billed as "from misdiagnosed mental patient to hospital director", and it clearly comes from the critical perspective that we call the psychiatric patients' liberation movement or the anti-psychiatric movement. So it is unlikely that the author will position himself as believing he needed to be in the facility, and equally unlikely that the people running it will be portrayed as agreeing with him.

Another couple books I picked out as prospects are Good as Gone by Amy Gentry, which a brief inside peek revealed itself to me as a suspense tale in which a daughter returns after years of being missing, but the mom actually isn't at all sure that this girl is really her. That creates the worry that the situation may be a dangerous one for her family. And An Anonymous Girl from Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen, the first couple chapters of which shape up as a psychological chess game in which a girl swipes another girl's invite to a paid research project involving personal questions about moral choices, and in which the psychologist running it knows she was not being honest about how she came to acquire the invite.

Then there's The Girl on the Train (Paula Hawkins) -- unreliable narrator, substance abuse, questionable mental status, blackouts (so maybe she's hiding stuff from herself and us)... but I think there's a risk involved in comparing one's unpublished book to something that's sold quite that successfully. Still, I won't rule it out.

Oh, and I'm still waiting on the arrival of Upstairs in the Crazy House, another memoir from a psychiatric survivor.

If any of these titles or descriptions conjures up the names of other books you think I should take a look at, let me know!




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My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

My third book is deep in tertiary drafts, and I'm seeking more beta readers for feedback. It is provisionally titled Within the Box and is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.






Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

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This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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I was going to send out some query letters but Optimum Online was having an outage, so I thought I'd compose a blog post about the querying process instead.

The core piece of the process is the pitch or query letter, which is going to be the leadoff part of nearly every query that gets sent out. Authors interested in getting their books published are encouraged to work long and hard on their query letters, honing them and perfecting them in order to hook the interest of the literary agents or publishers who will be reading them. They're supposed to be short, they need to grab the reader from the first sentence, they should make the reader want to hear more. On the more mechanical and utilitarian level, the query letter is supposed to provide the title of the book, the genre it fits into, its length in words, and a sense of what the core conflicts or plot trajectory or story line is about.

Obviously, given those requirements, the crafting of a query letter requires a skill, it's an art. I often wonder why having the ability to write what amounts to effective ad copy should be used as a measure of one's ability to write good-quality novel-length tomes. I mean, it's not the same process and doesn't necessarily involve the same skills, although it's reasonable to suppose there'd be some overlap. It's a bit like requiring that composers of symphonies submit a 90 second commercial jingle if they want to have the orchestra consider performing their work, and deciding on the basis of the jingle whether to look at the symphony itself. But that's how the game is played.

Some lit agents don't want anything except the query letter--just send that and if we're interested in seeing more, we'll ask. But more often, they want auxiliary accompanying documents.

The writing sample, an excerpt from the book that's being pitched, is commonly requested. The length of the excerpt varies all over the map, with some people wanting to see your first three pages and others asking you to provide your first four chapters. The most common specific requests that I've encountered are the first three pages, first five pages, first ten pages, first fifteen pages, first twenty pages, first twenty five, and first fifty; first chapter, first two chapters, first three, and first four. Given the possible variations of what constitutes chapter length, these requests are often expressed in hybrid form: "Paste the first three chapters or fifty pages", or "Send me 25 pages or first two chapters", or "Please provide your first three chapters (not to exceed 35 pages)".

You'll notice a word recurrently repeated in all of those variations. However much of it they wish to see, they nearly always want that much of the start of your book. That puts a pressure on authors to frontload their book so that things are happening rapidly on the first pages. It works against an author who prefers to set the stage and develop the characters before springing the book's primary situation on the reader, and perhaps explains Dan Brown. I suppose I do see the point to this: if a person picks up a book and it doesn't hold their attention in the early portions, they won't keep reading long enough to get to whatever may be in the book farther in. I do have my doubts about what anyone can tell about a book from reading the first five pages though, aside from "yes this writer can string sentences together in a tolerably pleasant style".

The synopsis is another thing that people often ask for. A synopsis is more or less what we used to think of as a "book report" back when we were in fourth grade. It's a summary of what happens in the book, in the order that it occurs in the book, often chapter by chapter. For fiction and memoirs and other narrative forms that have storylines, the synopsis is a description of the plot. A synopsis is usually a single page's worth, and unlike the query letter is not supposed to be a teaser but instead should reveal what's in the story, to the extent that that can be summarized in a page's worth of description.

It is also common for the description for how to submit to include a blurb about the author, providing a list of any prior books or other publications that the author has to their name, giving the author's credentials or otherwise explaining why this author is a good person to have written this tale, and giving any additional background. A request for some information about the author is particular prevalent for nonfiction titles, and often specifically includes questions about the authors platform, the existing audience of people who are already paying attention to what this authors says and writes, the folks who already follow this author on Twitter or subscribe to the author's YouTube channel and so forth.

A memoir is nonfiction and unfortunately that means authors of memoirs are expected to have a platform in a way that authors of novels are not. I wish more lit agents and publishers were inclined to recognize that memoirs have more in common with fiction than they do with How To Make Your Fortune By Investing Shrewdly in the Stock Market or The Making of the Governor: Gubernatorial Politics in the Instagram Era or Authentic Spectacular Creole Recipes For a Limited Budget.

Speaking of nonfiction, a lot of times the instructions on "how to submit" specify that people who are pitching nonfiction manuscripts should include a proposal. A proposal is a complex multi-part document designed to make the case for why this nonfiction book should be published; it typically kicks off with an extended argument for the need for such a book, then delves into the qualifications of the author to write it (this part being more or less interchangeable with the about the author piece described above), a description of the market for the book (who will be likely to consider reading it if they're made aware of it, and why), a list of comparable titles and how this book is different from what's already out there, a chapter by chapter breakdown of the material that the book will cover (this part, for a memoir, is loosely identical to a synopsis; for The Making of the Governor and other more conventional nonfiction books, it would be more like an outline of topics and subtopics that the book will address and how those topics are organized), and, finally, a marketing plan, a proposed course of action for publicizing the book and bringing it to the attention of people likely to purchase it.

Oh, and proposals will typically contain sample chapters. For once, though, the tendency is not to concentrate on the material most direct adjacent to the front cover. In a proposal, a sample chapter may be from any part of the book. Some proposals may contain two or three sample chapters, and in keeping with that, the instructions for submitting material may specify that one should send a proposal with a specified number of sample chapters.

Less commonly, lit agents and publishers may request a list and/or discussion of comparable titles as a standalone alternative to a formal proposal, or may request a discussion of the likely market for the book.



In the United States (although not so much in the UK), literary agents typically do not want to mess with file attachments, at least at the initial-query stage, and so all of the above components are to be pasted into the body of the email. More often than not, submission procedures will specifically say that no file attachments will be opened or even that no emails containing file attachments will be read.

Email has limited capacities for text formatting; despite the occasional instruction from a literary agent to include everything in the body of the email and yet to "be sure to indent every paragraph, use one inch margins on all sides, and set the text to double spaced throughout", email doesn't handle indentation of a paragraph's first lines, doesn't do double spacing, and can't be relied upon to format the text in a specific font or point size. Even italics and boldface are pretty iffy. I've found it useful to maintain separate text copies of all of these query components, one with an extra line of white space to offset divisions between paragraphs so that it works reliably as part of an email body.


I have a querying engine that lets me quickly assemble an outbound email:



As you can see from the dropdown menu, I can append a synopsis, a full fledged proposal, writing samples of various sizes, an about-the-author blurb, and other components of a query to the current email body and then send it in that format. (I can also send any one of those pieces as a file attachment for the occasional agent or publisher who wants to receive the proposal or sample chapters as a Word or PDF document instead).


You may be thinking that this doesn't seem very personalized, and indeed some lit agents' instructions say we should "please tell me why you selected me as the agent that you want on this project" and indicate that they prefer to receive letters that don't make them feel like they're receiving spam that has gone out to all the other lit agents out there. I do sometimes customize my query letters, editing them with an additional note to say "I thought this would be of particular appeal to you because of what you said in your 2017 interview with Writer's World about wanting more LGBTQ material written in our own voices" or whatever. But writers' workshops on crafting and perfecting the ideal query letter abound, as do online forums such as "Query Letter Hell" on Absolute Write, all of which are oriented around the notion that one hones and polishes a query letter and then sends it out to the various people that one wishes to query, not that one starts from scratch writing a query letter with one individual recipient in mind. And in my situation in particular, there are seldom a lot of legitimately good reasons to query this lit agent instead of that lit agent. It's not like any of them have a track record of representing genderqueer coming-out and coming-of-age stories and therefore would be a good choice for representing mine as well. There are those who have indicated an interest in handling "lesbian/gay" material and there are those who say that they represent memoirs or narrative nonfiction, but very few who have any kind of track record with coming-out stories or anything else that readily compares to what I wrote. So the honest answer in most cases to "why did you decide to query me on this project?" is along the lines of "you are in the business and open to queries and you are alive and breathe air".



As of today, I have sent 1,424 queries out to literary agents and an additional 64 to small publishers that allow authors to query them directly. From the lit agents I have received 1,292 rejections; 132 queries are currently outstanding. On five or six occasions, lit agents have requested more material before ultimately saying they were not interested in representing my book, but none have ever offered me a business arrangement. From the publishers, I twice had signed contracts to have my book published, once with a publisher that went bankrupt and once with a publisher who assigned an editor to me who wanted to discard the first 33% of the book, which I was unwilling to do; I've had 62 rejections and none are currently outstanding because I was complying with a publisher's policy of exclusivity, and only got the rejection letter the other day.


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Hot damn! From one of my query letters to a nonfiction lit agent, query only, no additional materials, I just got a request for a proposal plus sample chapters!


So once again my book is under consideration with two agents simultaneously! One full manuscript (still holding my breath on that one) and one formal proposal.


Current stats for The Story of Q:

Total queries: 640
Rejections: 573
Outstanding: 65
Under Consideration: 2

As NonFiction:

Total queries: 439
Rejectionsw: 388
Outstanding: 50
Under Consideration: 1

As Fiction:

Total queries: 201
Rejections: 185
Outstanding: 15
Under Consideration:


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