After a week of being back from my trip, and being extremely lazy while recovering from my trip, I knew that it was about time to get on top of things and start on the next step of this project of mine. So today I refined my query letter, which I wrote the first draft of before I left for the trip.
Touching up the query letter actually took the majority of my day, which you wouldn’t expect since it is only a 1-page document. But it is one of the most important pages an aspiring writer can write, and I needed to make sure it was in tip shape. Arguably the most major thing I had to do to complete the query letter was decide on a subtitle for the book, even though the title and subtitle are obviously subject to change. After about an hour of research and brainstorming, I settled on The Pursuit of America. At first it was A Pursuit of the Heart of America, but that seemed a little long for what I wanted, and the double use of “of” didn’t thrill me, so I changed that to A Pursuit of America, but then thought “a” was too soft, so I changed it to the firmer “the”. So if I have my way, the book would ship as Rambling Man: The Pursuit of America. All the other changes I made in the query letter were just tightening it up in general, and I have to be honest, I like it and I think it is good.
Once I got that done, I sent it off to my first pick of literary agencies. As I mentioned before, it is considered common courtesy to only send your query letter to one literary agency at a time, which is fine but also slows the process down, as I have to wait at the most 3 weeks before I know if they like it. Most literary agencies receive such a high volume of queries that they operate under the “If we like it we’ll get back to you within 3 weeks, if we don’t like it then after 3 weeks you’ll know that we didn’t” system. So now I play the waiting game, though I will be using the time to work on the next step, my book proposal. So all in all, exciting day! The hope is that I won’t have to wait too long to find an agency that wants to see my proposal and represent me. I will definitely keep the Tumblr updated as they come to me.
