sample massage resumes
Question about submission guidelines–quite confused, answer from an industry insider preferred?
In a few months, I am planning on submitting a sample of my manuscript to a literary agency. Here are the requests of this agency:
Query Letter
Synopsis of the novel
A sample chapter
A brief resume
It seems that these requirements will get into the mundane area of redundancy. To my knowledge, isn’t a query letter a massive eqo massage (especially if the synopsis is requested to be separate), and a person without credentials–such as myself–wouldn’t a brief resume be completely useless? Should I just not bother with the resume? Perhaps the agent will get the idea that it is my first work just by the absence of it. Or will this show that I am unable to follow protocol?
A query letter is different from a synopsis. The query is like a teaser, kind of like back cover copy that makes the person reading it want to know more. It should say Who your character is, What happens to them, the Choices they have to make, and the Consequences of those choices. The Query Shark has excellent examples of what a query should (and shouldn’t) look like.
I have no idea what you mean by the query letter being an eqo (ego?) massage.
The synopsis tells everything that happens in the book from beginning to end, without leaving anything out. It’s a different animal from the query. Nathan Bransford has a post telling how to do that.
The sample chapter (which should be the first chapter) will give the agent an idea of your style.
