Author - Adult Retelling
This author is remaining anonymous and doling out some killer querying advice! For the author’s anonymity, I’m excluding the name of the author, book, and agent.
Query Draft 1
BOOK is a modern retelling of Jane Austen’s Persuasion. In Jane Austen’s original novel, Anne turns away from the love of her life in order to please her family. But what if she’d given up love to follow their advice to pursue her own career in order to fulfill her family’s ambitions for her, only to have it all go horribly wrong?
Anne Elliot is a burned-out Hollywood movie star whose husband has died, leaving her to fall back into dangerous and destructive patterns. For her own good, her family insists she move home to her dad’s small Iowa farm. After moving home, Anne is forced to deal with her failure as a Hollywood A-list star and failure to grieve in a healthy way. While clumsily picking her way through the grief minefield to make new emotional connections, the man whose heart she broke angrily confronts her, making her wonder if she isn’t cut out for relationships. She doesn’t get any help from her father, who is distant and obtuse, nor does it help she is faced with negotiating a relationship with a possessive, judgmental housekeeper. To survive and heal, Anne needs to embrace her alter ego who she has been running from, and take control of the fame that has been haunting her. But how can she open that door without letting all her demons out as well?
Per your submission guidelines, I've pasted the first ten pages of BOOK for you below. As a life-long lover of books I have seen the power of stories to entertain, guide, and heal. Like JULIET, NAKED and PERSUADING ANNIE, I hope my story can also inspire others to live the life they chose.
Author Note:
This query had a low response rate. When editing, this author found the source of the problem— that middle paragraph.
Query Draft 2 (Final)
BOOK is a modern retelling of Jane Austen’s Persuasion. In Jane Austen’s original novel, Anne turns away from the love of her life in order to please her family. But what if she’d given up love to follow their advice to pursue her own career in order to fulfill her family’s ambitions for her, only to have it all go horribly wrong?
What do you do when you can no longer be who you were? Being a Hollywood A-list Movie Star, landed her in rehab. Then her Happily Ever After was taken away when her husband died of cancer. Shattered and swimming back into the bottle, Anne’s family thinks moving back to her small Iowa hometown—away from the tabloids and back with people who love her—is just what she needs to heal. Even if it means facing her estranged father who she barely knows anymore, her father’s housekeeper who wants her gone, and the man whose heart she broke when she left all those years ago. And there is the matter of the ghost of her former Hollywood persona, hanging over her like a storm cloud. In the end, Anne finds she needs to embrace her past in order to build a stronger future.
Per your submission guidelines, I've pasted the first twenty-five pages of BOOK for you below. As a life-long lover of books I have seen the power of stories to entertain, guide, and heal. Like JULIET, NAKED and PERSUADING ANNIE, I hope my story can also inspire others to live the life they chose.
Notes:
You might read these queries and think they’re so similar they should have similar request rates, but you’d be wrong. While the first query had a low request rate, the second one received 2 full requests within one hour of sending.
The difference? The second paragraph. One thing that really helped was writing the letter and then taking a look at with a critical eye about a month later and letting myself not get so caught up in the pressure of querying that it stifled my “voice.”
Changing that one paragraph completely shifted how the agents felt about my work. And you can see the difference! The language is more vivid and the imagery more clear. And clearly, that made all the difference.