A Webinar with NO Captions on Common Mistakes in Queries
- Jun 30, 2020
- 2 min read
Recently, I attended a webinar on twenty mistakes to avoid when writing your query letter. Honestly, I haven't started working on my query letter yet; I'm still editing The Lost Daughter. However, I'd seen a FaceBook advert about the webinar and I thought it would be interesting.
I was right.
It was interesting. A suggestion I would have is to have CAPTIONS. Even though yes, I knew it was a webinar, I also know that they can enable auto-captions, so when they are talking, most words are captioned - at least, better than nothing.
Back to the webinar... Since it was a) audio and not video, so no reading lips and b) no captions, I struggled to follow the full webinar. I even had it going directly to my hearing aids, which typically works better than headphones as headphones either a) I don't have my hearing aids in so it's all muffled, or b) my hearing aids are squished and the mic is on the back and not where the headphones are pushing.... Needless to say, it is easier to have my hearing aids connected to either my phone or computer for the webinar so I can get some of the words.
They had sent a PDF before with fill in the blanks notes section so that you can add extra notes and get all the mistakes people tend to make in queries written down. I will say this, at least here, the mistakes were listed at the top when she was talking about them.
The interesting thing is some mistakes I figured were common sense. For example: proofing. Some people don't proof what they've written. Or following the rules (i.e. the submission rules for the agent) or submitting to the wrong genre, or a lack of focus (querying more than one book in one letter - like "if you don't like this book, I do have this one and it is a different genre, etc."). I wanted to be like, really?!
But then I thought about it, and even though it seems common sense to me, if I hadn't been involved in a writing group and done light research, would I have made these mistakes?
Granted, I'm sure I would've made some of the others: playing hide and seek with information (like "check out more on my website!), not knowing the details of my genre (word count, etc.), pitching too soon, thinking it's all about me (giving long details about my writing versus why I'm qualified in short answer) and even, giving up too soon.
But now, I know.
It was good information even without me understanding the full webinar and I'm glad that I took the hour to listen.
This quote was listed and I loved it. I definitely think that this is a 100% true.
So now, I need to go and finish editing my The Lost Daughter, give to my writing group to critique, edit in their recommendations, chop it down to at least 100,000 words (though it needs to get lower) and then begin working on querying.
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