The query

I've spent a considerable amount of time the past two months striving to learn the art of the query.

The query letter is a strange beast. It is, essentially, the high-falutin' literary world, which forever looks down on those bourgeouis attention-span-challenged Hollywood producer types, acting exactly like those bourgeouis attention-span-challenged Hollywood producer types. As in, you have two minutes to convince me to represent/buy your book. The scope of the task is the same whether you're approaching an agent or a publisher: pitch it in a paragraph. No, a shorter paragraph. Really, a sentence would be better. Actually, what they seem to want is for you to compress your 400-page, 81,000 word story -- plot, character, subplot, theme, genre and key selling points -- into a slogan roughly the size of "just do it."

Now, the reasons for this development are entirely understandable. There are a lot more aspiring authors out there than there are quality manuscripts. I have spent much of my career in politics, corporate communications and the music world interacting with people who are convinced they are good writers. A fraction of them are correct. This is not a put-down; it's a fact of life. Despite what some may believe, writing is not like riding a bike. Writing is like competing in a double-century race. You have to train every day, you have to learn from your competition, you have to be able to both strategize and improvise, and you have to have some measure of innate skill. If any one of those is missing, the best you can hope is to be pretty good. And pretty good is not going to get an unknown writer in the door of any agent or publisher in America.

So, agents and publishers have good reason to make you keep it short, just like that last paragraph should have been. If you can't edit yourself, why should they waste time reading your manuscript?

The steady yet painful process of improving my query letters over the past few weeks has offered me insights that range far beyond the basics of self-marketing, though. I started this process very much in marketing mode. My early queries sound like episodes of Project: Greenlight, full of important-sounding adjectives and adverbs and rendered in the deep and urgent tones of a movie-trailer narrator.

My first round of rejections convinced me that I was doing something wrong. My pitch was technically sound. But the tone was off. The biggest clue was perhaps the most obvious one -- my queries sounded nothing like my book. They sounded distant where the book is immediate, stiff rather than comfortable, self-conscious instead of confident.

This time around, I wrote the query like I wrote the book. I attacked the subject in bursts of short, potent phrases. I gave it a tone of total belief in the project. I edited ruthlessly. And I didn't let myself obsess over the "finished" product. My work here is done; out the door with you. Go forth and multiply.

An hour later -- more and more agents are accepting electronic queries -- I had my first nibble.

The key to self-marketing for me, though, turned out to be a matter of emphasis. As soon as I emphasized the "self," by writing naturally, the "marketing" became much more effective. My words felt genuine. They rang true. They had power.

So there's your lesson -- speak truth. You don't have to reveal everything. You just need to say what you mean, and mean what you say. Do that, and your audience will listen.