Joe Moore at Kill Zone gives 8 tips on writing a strong query letter.

A.C. Crispin from Writer Beware on How to Write a Query Letter.

For counterexamples we have Slushpile Hell, (via Redlines and Deadlines)

Then there’s a whole site devoted to query critique I found recently, Query Shark.

1. Moral Event Horizon – You have a character who’s the bad guy.  But we all like to believe in redemption, and he’s got a tragic back-story that makes him a little sympathetic, and he’s got enough charisma that the reader would like to see him join the side of the angels.  The Moral Event Horizon it the event where he does something so heinous, so evil, that any chance at redemption is lost.  It’s the point of no return where all ambiguity about the character’s status as in irredeemable evil bastard is removed: he’s raped the heroine, killed her child and/or eaten their puppy. Note, this can go unpunished, in which case you have a
2. Karma Houdini – The complete bastard has eaten the puppy, burnt down the orphanage and kicked granny downstairs.  He’s walked off with a million bucks stolen from the Salvation Army.  If there was any justice, the hero would serve him a gruesome and appropriate death. . . but no, the guy walks off into the sunset, happy as a clam.  That’s it, he lives happily ever after.  This character may be a sign you’re reading about a
3. Crapsack World – The world is fucked up not just on a social level, but on a spiritual and philosophical level.  Evil is rewarded, good is punished, and if God exists, he doesn’t care for you.  A staple of satire as well as horror.  Of course, when done badly, can result in a
4. Broken Aesop – You had a moral in there, right?  About the sacredness of human life in against the boots of a faceless bureaucracy, and how your hero saved the world from the evil overlords. . . by stomping that human life out of thousands of the evil overlord’s faceless servants?  However, all might be forgiven with resort to
5. The Rule of Cool – If something is just wicked awesome enough, the audience doesn’t care how believable it is.

So, what is the name?

I present AuthorForSale.com! [Are you getting images of strippers doing  Jane Austin cosplay?  No?  Well now you are, heh.]

Hello author S. Andrew Swann, [Is that the lit-fetish version of "Hello Nurse?"]

Author For Sale. com The Showcase for authors where the publisher comes looking for You! [Where gratuitous capitalization comes looking for You!]

Visit: www.authorforsale.com [In case we cannot intuit the url from the above.]

The above link is exciting news for authors everywhere and is turning the literary industry on its head. [I'm excited.] It is fast altering the balance of power in the endeavour of publication and contract negotiation. You can now present your literary talent on a truly international stage [as opposed to the normal submission process wherein federal law prohibits the querying of anyone 50 miles beyond the territorial waters of the U.S.], and be seen by 100’s of publishers specializing in your specific genre [Even if my genre is Amish lesbian splatterpunk erotica?], all searching for new or established authors. [As opposed to the thousands of publishers not looking for new or established authors.] This means that when you get a book deal offer, you may even have more than one on the table to barter with [The economy is so bad, some publishers are paying in chickens], rather than have to accept the only deal available.[Why do I think if you had that deal, you wouldn't be taking this spam so seriously?]

You are being offered a confidential [Ooops, not anymore, my bad.] Free Trial[i.e This crap will cost you money in the long run.] Showcase Listing valid until September 30th as part of a Writers Group[You know the Writers Group, right?  Every year they hand out the Book Award for Best Novel in a Genre] association.[i.e. We lifted your name from the SFWA mailing list, and we're desperate for a published author to lend our hare-brained scheme some legitimacy] After the Free Trial [With Gratuitous Caps!] date you may terminate your listing with no obligations or renew your account by payment of the membership listing fee as ruling on October 1st 2010. Your Free Showcase Listing will attract the exact same benefits entitled to fully subscribed members, so the sooner you register, the more free.exposure [More and more I get the image of Lit porn. Shake those metaphors, baby. Yeah, show some symbolism.  That's hot.  Come give daddy a little denouement. ] you’ll have.

Your Showcase can present an intended literary concept,[I intend to have a literary concept!  Sometime.  Watch this space.] a work-in-progress draft [Yeah, show everyone your fist draft, that'll leave them begging for more.] or a completed manuscript. Getting early exposure may even attract an advance to complet it. [Yes, post a complete manuscript and they'll pay for you to complet it.  Instructions on how to "complet" a manuscript come with a full membership subscription.]

[Technical login crap deleted to leave room for snark]

You want a more serious deconstruction of AuthorForSale.com, you can visit the Writer Beware Blog.  Here’s the thing.  The concept of this site is, essentially, trying to outsource the slush-pile.  Seems like an OK idea in the abstract, after all that is a major hassle for most editors and writers.  But, you need to ask yourself something; why does any editor want to go to this site when they have the old slush-pile staring them in the face?  It’s not like they’re going to stop getting traditional submissions.  So adding this website to the mix is actually increasing their workload.  Let’s add to this the fact that publishers have to pay to play, over five grand in fact.  That’s a small mid-list advance right there, for the privilege of adding additional work and getting more of something they already get too much of for free.  Yeah, they’re going to beat down your door.  Oh, and that author subscription fee?  Only $225 a year.  For something the author can do for the price of postage, and insure that it gets somewhere at least in the same building as an agent or an editor.  Hell, this website costs a tenth of that, and I guarantee you more publishing professionals have seen this content than would ever dream going somewhere with the squiktastic name AuthorForSale.

You’d be better off posting your writing on Facebook, it’s free and would be at least twice as effective.

“In other words: space colonization is implicitly incompatible with both libertarian ideology and the myth of the American frontier.”

Okay then.  I guess it should come as no surprise that I think he’s wrong.  Or, should I say, half wrong.

I think I’ll first address the point wherein I think he’s got it right.  He points out, correctly, that space colonization is horrendously expensive in time and resources, the infrastructure needed to independently maintain a technological civilization is pretty damn huge, and the nature of a space borne environment means that voting with one’s feet is pretty much off the table.  Thus he’s quite correct that any analogies to the American frontier are waaaaaay off the mark.  Unfortunately, there’s a bit of a strawman there because this also means the same thing about analogies with the Australian frontier, or the Age of Exploration, or any other historical migration/invasion/colonization you might want to name ever since our Australopithecus ancestors walked out of Africa.  This is for two reasons, one he mentions and one he doesn’t.  Every other historical migration of humans from point A to point B involved a point B that was largely habitable and could support a population on its own.  The point he doesn’t mention is that every human migration also had a motive of somehow exploiting point B for the profit of those migrating: be it better farmland, more slaves, gold, oil, or just some real estate to put between them and the folks who wanted to steal their stuff.

Where he gets it wrong is the following:

I postulate that the organization required for such exploration is utterly anathema to the ideology of the space cadets, because the political roots of the space colonization movement in the United States rise from taproots of nostalgia for the open frontier that give rise to a false consciousness of the problem of space colonization. In particular, the fetishization of autonomy, self-reliance, and progress through mechanical engineering — echoing the desire to escape the suffocating social conditions back east by simply running away — utterly undermine the program itself and are incompatible with life in a space colony (which is likely to be at a minimum somewhat more constrained than life in one of the more bureaucratically obsessive-compulsive European social democracies, and at worst will tend towards the state of North Korea in Space).

This is where he makes a mistake that I fear is endemic in popular political thought on the left; the idea that since libertarianism cannot abide collectivism and believes in a minimal State, it must therefore be a philosophy of social nihilism that opposes any and all collective action, organization, or rules.  (How often I hear, “But don’t you approve of traffic laws?” in a self-congratulatory tone.)  This, to put it mildly, is bullshit.  The libertarian ideology is NOT incompatible with life in a space colony, however draconian the rules of survival need be, as long as the colony is a privately run enterprise and the inhabitants were all there by their own choice, and aren’t living off the threat of force to appropriate the resources needed for their survival. But that scenario runs counter to the unstated assumption that it is impossible to have a massive organized effort of people and resources of the kind required to build a space colony without a State-run effort appropriating, by force, the resources and manpower to do it.  That is also bullshit.  If there is a significant enough return to be had on the investment, a private entity can act with the resources and organization of a State.  (Though, given the corporatist post-fascist globalized world we all live in, the most likely scenario is the corporate hijacking of the State’s monopoly on force to have the State appropriate the resources to invest in space exploration adventures on their behalf, therefore minimizing their own risks by spreading it among the entire taxpaying population, sort of like the banking industry— of course someone will use that as a critique of capitalism and call for more State control of the effort, giving yet more power to the symbiotic State-corporate entity, which is so completely missing the fucking point my head wants to explode…)

The primary reason that neither State nor corporation has built anything remotely like the space colonies envisioned in SF is because there’s absolutely no compelling reason for them to do so.  So far the only profitable uses we’ve found for space is communicating long distances and spying on the enemy.  Neither of which requires a manned presence.  As I said above, every human migration from point A to point B also had a motive of somehow exploiting point B for the profit of those migrating.  So one might as well just say that such colonization— at least until there is some substantial profit in the enterprise— is anathema to human nature.

If you do, meditate on the two following facts:

• Nobody likes everything.
• Everyone hates something.

#1 Means that it is impossible to write something that every single reader will enjoy. Don’t even try to delude yourself it is possible. Look at the bestselling books on Amazon, and how many 1-star reviews they collect. Look at all the hate sites that are devoted to ripping on popular works of fiction. The more people read your work, the more people will find they dislike it. Sorry, that’s the way it works.

#2 Means that, whatever you write, some reader somewhere, will find some element, trope or character you’ve used to be feloniously objectionable and will invalidate your entire work based on that fact. The list of things that can do this to some people is endless: violence to animals, any depiction of rape, women written by men, homosexuality, pre-marital sex, drug use, positive depictions of Republicans, magical nanotech, pop-cultural references, alternate history, unhappy endings. . . Face the fact that whatever you write will contain someone’s hot-button topic. And note, unless the person reacting is a professional reviewer, they may not even be aware of their hot button— until someone points out that they’ve given a one star review to every book they’ve read that has a first person female narrator.

Accept these truths and your life as a writer will be much more pleasant.

Over at BSC Review, Lexi C had this to say:

In Swann’s first book in this series, Wolfbreed, we were introduced to a young girl who had grown up treated like a monster, but who found a way to reconcile who she was with who she could be.  In this second book, set a hundred years later in 14th century Poland, it’s the exact opposite set up.  Maria grew up human, unaware of who she was or what she could become.  Upon learning of her heritage, she has to reconcile the monster she sees herself becoming to the human she wants to remain.

I enjoyed Wolf’s Cross more than its predecessor.  I found myself empathizing more with Maria’s problems than I had with Lilly’s.  Maria’s problems, though similar to Lilly’s (just from the opposite spectrum), felt more developed.  Whereas Lilly struggled with the notion of being a human, Maria struggled with being herself; for Maria it was a question of whether she could retain herself while lost in the power of being the wolf. [More...]

Then over at Dear Author, Shuzluva says:

Books that are in medieval time settings haven’t been my thing; for me the 14th century generally conjures up images of the Plague, dank, miserable castles, and men and women who are happy to remain unwashed for as long as possible. That being the case, it took me quite a while to pick up Wolf’s Cross, but I’m glad I finally managed it. [More...]

Lastly, at SFFWorld.com, I have Rob H. Bedford saying the following:

Werewolves and Teutonic Knights make for an interesting combination in Wolf’s Cross, S.A. Swann’s commendable follow-up to Wolfbreed. In the 14th Century, a band of Holy Men are hunting a monster, a demon who walks like man and beast when their trail leads them to a small Polish village. The P.O.V. character on the Church’s side is a young man named Joseph, who is just an initiate and not a full member of the order. In the village, we are introduced to Maria, a young girl living with her sick father, stepbrother and stepmother as she is tasked with helping the wounded Knights upon their arrival. Sparks fly between Joseph and Maria immediately, but their stations in life prevent them from acting on their impulses. [More...]

Wolf’s Cross

When I wrote Wolfbreed I wasn’t concerned for markets, or genre, or much else beyond having my muse promise not to beat me senseless.  It was written outside of my contracts for DAW, so I had no real constraints on what I was doing, and no expectations of anything beyond its fiery conclusion.  Everything had been wrapped up, the still-living characters all had their main conflicts resolved.  All the plot threads tied up with a nice bow made of human entrails. . .

Of course you have to go there tor read the rest of it.

1. Write first! Using the web to promote your writing if you aren’t actually writing is, to put it bluntly, a damnfool thing to do. Nothing wrong with using the internet for its own sake, but don’t rationalize it as something akin to actually writing. It ain’t. (This also includes blogging, at least until you turn that into an income stream.)
2. You only need to have enough of an internet presence so that when someone Googles you and/or your work, the first hit is something you control. Everything else is optional.
3. Make sure your site/blog/Facebook page has links to things about you that you want to promote but aren’t under your control (Amazon pages for your book, your publisher, nice reviews and articles &c.)
4. Make your presence on the web about YOU as an author first, then about the work. i.e. when you get a website/domain, it should be BIGNAMEAUTHOR.com rather than KICKASSBOOKTITLE.com because, when you get the next contract it will be something else, and you have to start from scratch. Look at my site as an example of how to organize things like this.
5. Whenever you’re out commenting on blogs and forums and so on, try to have a consistent identifiable persona as an author. Even if you aren’t pimping your work (and you shouldn’t when uninvited) if you have a consistent identifiable YOU, across multiple sites that’s at least as valuable as being on a panel at a con somewhere.

“On Friday, March 16th 2007, I had an idea for a novel. It had been bubbling in my head for about a week after watching the anime Elfen Lied. Since it wouldn’t leave me alone, I decided to just write the thing out of my system even though I had other things I was supposed to be working on. Little did I know what I was getting into. By the start of April, I was forty thousand words into the thing. That was the point I took a breather and started realizing that this was more than just getting an idea out of my system.

Go read the rest.

And our wonderful UPS guy decided to leave the package out in the rain, on top of a trash can next to the house. . .  But I got this to cheer me up.  Go there, you may win a book.

I might share a job-title with the writers on Lost, but we are actually doing two very different things.

One of the better ways to play wit it is to search for a book/movie/tv series you happen to like (or are just familiar with), and scroll down to the section listing what tropes it provides examples of.  Here are some choice entries to get you started:

• Stupid Jetpack Hitler.
• Attack of the Killer Whatever.
• Milkman Conspiracy.
• Deus Sex Machina.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?

Ok, I’m going to cheat a little here, because there was once a time when if you were talking a fantasy series, you were not talking “novels.” From the pulps up through the 1970s, if you were talking a series of anything, you were likely talking about short stories published in the genre magazines. And, if you’re talking overlooked work today, that whole class of fiction — from Jirel of Joiry, to Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser — is probably almost unknown to most of today’s readers. Which is a shame, because much of what appears in print today draws its inspiration from this early stuff, directly or indirectly. And I’d like to draw attention to someone who may be to gritty noir urban fantasy what Tolkien is to the grand high-fantasy epic, and probably no one reading this knows who he is.

The author is Seabury Quinn, and the series is about occult detective Jules de Grandin. These stories, which began appearing in Weird Tales in the mid 1920s, featured an investigator who’s been called “the occult Hercule Poirot,” and were incredibly popular at the time. Popular enough that reader polls consistently had him beating such now-better-known notables as H.P.Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and C.L.Moore. And, throughout the pulp era, Quinn had more stories published than any other contributor. One-hundred-forty-nine stories between 1925 and 1951. (At least in words, more than enough to fulfill the three “novel” requirement.) While he may not have been as stellar an author as his contemporaries, his pair of occult detectives presages the X-Files, the Dresden Books, and any number of modern titles where we find the mixture of genre mystery or police procedural tropes with the supernatural in a modern setting.

Go read everyone else.

OK, my position on fan-fic is pretty clear: I think it’s immoral, I _know_ it’s illegal, and it makes me want to barf whenever I’ve inadvertently encountered some of it involving my characters.

Of course, I have some different conclusions (or I probably wouldn’t be posting about it.)

You can’t camp in someone’s backyard without permission, even if you aren’t raising a marijuana crop back there. And you can’t use someone’s copyrighted characters for your own purposes, no matter what those purposes are. Really. I’m not making it up; this is International Copyright Law.

Uh, not quite. There is a concept called Fair Use that, despite being attacked by corporate interests like the RIAA & MPAA, is still part of copyright law. It’s why you get to DVR an episode of Lost. It’s why South Park, or Saturday Night Live, or any random stand-up comic can satirize any piece of the culture out there, copyright or not. It’s why I can quote the blog text to critique it’s points. Lastly, the copyright is of the actual text, using a character or setting is much more iffy. In effect, Fair Use is based on if the new work is transformative, the purpose of the work, the amount of the work copied, and the effect on the original author’s ability to exploit their copyright. Basically, almost all of Fan Fiction falls into Fair Use as a practical matter, and only shades into illegality when it starts entering commercial use.

I can understand how she must feel about what she’s seen, Rule 34 and all.  However, I think her argument (which has a few good points that boil down to “you really want to be a writer, come up with your own stuff,” and “you want to play in someone’s franchise go pitch a script to the right people.”) jumps the shark when it hits the following analogy:

But…imagine opening your daily mail and finding a letter detailing an explicit sexual encounter between, say, your twenty-one-year-old daughter and your forty-eight-year-old male neighbor—written by the neighbor. At the bottom it says, “Fiction! Just my imagination. All cool, right?” This would perhaps prevent your calling the police, but I repeat…ick.

I wouldn’t like people writing sex fantasies for public consumption about me or members of my family—why would I be all right with them doing it to the intimate creations of my imagination and personality?

The conflation of fanfic writers with creepy stalker behavior is a little over the top. And frankly, books aren’t your children. And to answer the latter question, you need to be all right with that because being an writer means you’re throwing your “intimate creations of your imagination” out for public consumption. Its an act of exhibitionism, and people will love it, people will hate it, and some people will use it for wanking material.