To Share the Beast: A Query Letter to My ...

To Share the Beast: A Query Letter to Myself

Feb 16, 2023

I have to say, I wrote a banger of an agent letter. (And one of you helped me refine it; thank you! 💜) I knew I wanted to base it on the letter that Erin Morgenstern shared in an interview online about The Night Circus—a book I love but which is very different from mine. What I loved about her letter was that it flies in the face of everything agents say they want to see in a query. She allowed the story to sell itself, and said nothing at all about herself. And here’s the best part: it’s practically a ready-made jacket blurb. Here is my finished product:

Dear [Agent]:

An amphitheater of stone swells with a symphony made of more than music. The colossal, crystalline manticore that plays its part has just been tuned to a Mode of rebirth. This is Coruscar, where Modes are magic. For some.

The Tuners survived their work, today. They reel with the other highbloods in the audience, captive to an empathic Rush no adept can refuse. But one of them—the apprentice—is wishing she were elsewhere, with the music that truly moves her soul. It’s a love as dangerous as anything she faces on the back of a Core. It’s about to get even more so.

Somewhere up in the common seats, a songwriter is dreaming of the magic she will make with this Orchestra. With this music that doesn’t belong to her. It will belong to her, if she can just endure the trade she’s made to change the world.

The beautiful monster at the center of it all dances, joyfully aware of the disruption he’s set in motion. On the eve of its Bicentennial, Coruscar is already poised for upheaval. But even he will fail to foretell what the final Tuning has in store.

TO TUNE THE BEAST is a high fantasy with a strong backbone of romance, and is the first in a series. It combines a dual coming-of-age story with the events leading up to the Bicentennial rebellion, as told through two intertwining first-person narratives, several third-person narratives, and epigraphs. It is complete at 245,000 words.

[The first five pages are] included below. The full manuscript, and/or a chapter-by-chapter summary, is available upon request. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Because you are all cool people, I’m pretty sure you would want to read more if you got such an email. Even if there was a mistake in the sample that the author failed to catch because she was trying to do too much in one day. (This happened on only two queries, fortunately.) Mistakes, though, are bedeviling my life with this book. I’m currently in the process of my third and hopefully last proofreading edit, and I hope to have all the inconsistencies fixed by March 1. I always have goals. They just…shift sometimes. 

I originally planned to go into my adventures submitting to agents so far, and the daunting (and mistake-inducing) variety of demands they have, but that would only be interesting if you were an author researching the publishing process. I can tell you that publishing companies are even more unwilling to take unsolicited manuscripts than they ever were, so agents are the only way to go. Unless you’re not actually interested in publishing traditionally at all.

It’s taken a lot of soul-searching to come to the conclusion that my motivations to share the Coruscar series with readers aren’t the sort that call for a traditional publisher. Nobody should expect to make money as an author these days, so it was never about that for me. More importantly, it hasn’t been about making a name for myself, either. A name…is pressure my body is not equipped to handle. It’s also personal exposure I don’t desire. There are many introverted authors out there who have self-marketing in their publishing contracts; they just go out there and take one for the team. I can’t pretend to an agent that I’ll be that sort of novelist. As a poet, I’m a little different, because that world is different; maybe I’ll elaborate on that in a future post. But with this story… It’s just like my query letter. It’s the story that wants out in the world, not me.

So, my new goal is this: honor the story I’ve created (and intend to keep creating), free myself from the creative-industrial complex, and copyleft the book, using a license that’s friendly to fan fiction writers and artists, while preserving my intellectual property. I’ll create a professional-looking digital version that won’t give a penny to Jeff Bezos, and print 25 6x9 paperbacks to start, selling only as much as I need to cover printing and paying my artist (who’s going to cost me about $1000). Based on the mockup I just did with Scrivener, the book will be a bit over 600 pages. If I print it via Lulu (my preference for sentimental reasons) it will cost me less than $500 to print 25 copies, for which I’d charge $17 per paperback (and I can print more if there’s demand). The digital copies, I’ll sell for $9. Breaking even is my mission. Take that, Simon & Schuster.

Questioning publication as a motive always raises the question of why I write, or create any kind of art at all. For me and a lot of people, the simplest answer is: because stories demand to be told. A book like the one I’ve just written is a living thing. A social creature, who needs the company of people who appreciate it, who will create their own fiction and art around it, and see to its evolution. The story wants to be its best self. Or its best Beast, as it were. 

If I haven’t asked this before, I do need beta readers, so if you want an advance look, and are willing to provide me with feedback/edits (any level of detail is better than nothing), now is the time to let me know! Thank you so much, everyone, for backing this project, and all your encouragement. I may be going it alone, but not where it counts!

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