Please help me with my query letter

[Joanna]

Thanks for any advice!

Dear,

I understand you are a fan of adult urban fantasy. I hope you will be interested in my novel, BREAKING RINGS.

Born with achromatopsia, twenty-seven-year-old Aviana Markosyan’s gray world floods with color when she hires smooth talking, private investigator Raiden Gravi to find her parents.

But when her neighbor is beheaded, her ex-boyfriend Harbor and straight-shooting best friend Nyxon have no choice but to introduce her to their Cynder world and Grounder heritage.

Her jaded, exiled father, Uzziah, discovers her location, lives are threatened and Aviana has to re-examine her assumptions about family and self-sacrifice.

Unable to return to her normal life, she dives deep into the Grounder world and meets an array of Grounders with beautiful or dangerous evobilities. As Aviana spends more time with Raiden her feelings are caught between him and Harbor. But her heart splits in two when she discovers Raiden’s evobility and the deadly secrets he keeps.

Because Uzziah is hell bent on returning to Cynder to reclaim her mother and his throne, he partners with the evil Dr. Monrowvia, who secretly wants to implant a deadly evobility into Aviana to gain power on Cynder.

By the end of the year, each character learns the price of wasted time while uncovering the deceptions of love, fate, and friendship.

BREAKING RINGS is set in present day Vancouver, WA, where hip meets historic. I have a masters in School Counseling, and when I am not hosting one-on-one sessions I am the advisor for our school’s writing club.

At 90,000 words, BREAKING RINGS is the first in a planned series. One reader has compared the novel's themes to those of Karen Marie Moning’s Kingdom of Shadow and Light. The manuscript is available, in part or full, upon request. Thanks for your time and consideration.

[Author56]

I'm very confused by this blurb. There are some good ideas, but I can't tell how each event links, I'm overwhelmed with different character names I can't remember, and without any explanation of the organization I don't know what the stakes are. The blurb's also extremely long.
I'd recommend bringing it down to the basics. Who are grounders? What does Aviana want from them? What happens to her to form the crux of the story? Going into her private investigator and friends aren't important unless they're related to that.
Hope this helps!
-Author 56

[Alexander]

Hello Joanna-

First, good luck querying! I'm about to dive into it again and it is a ton of work.

In my mind, the query letter has two parts: the blurb (just the short sentences capturing the essence of the book itself), and then the query letter around it, which is an intro to the agent plus a bit of bio about yourself.

Personally, I recommend focusing on just the blurb to start. Get that tight and in the voice you'd like, and then it isn't too much work to add the query letter around it. (for what it's worth, I think your agent intro and bio is pretty good already).

The query letter should be 250 words maximum, with 100-150 words for the blurb (leaving just 100 words or so for the intro and bio). Other people sometimes quote different numbers, but in my experience this is the most expected range and agents don't have time for anything longer!

You're at about 300 words total now, with over 190 words on the blurb ("Born with achromatopsia ... the deceptions of love, fate, and friendship."). So I think you should cut the blurb down to around 140 words, and then you're about done (since the rest of the query letter is otherwise about the right length).

My notes on the blurb:

Don't include any "meta" information ("This book unfolds in three parts..." or "The character learns the lessons of ..."). In this case, I think you can cut the final sentence ("By the end of the year..."). Instead of capturing the arc of the novel, I've found the best use of the blurb is to place a character and a problem in front of the agent, so they ask "oh my gosh, how will the character get out of this?"

"When her neighbor is beheaded..." this is a bit abrupt to me! "Murdered" is probably enough, since I think too much graphic violence in the blurb might be a turn off, and I think the exact nature of the murder isn't critical for the blurb anyway.

"Cynder world...Grounder heritage" these are new terms, and you probably won't have time to define them in the blurb. Can you convey them with something familiar? "underworld" or "spoiled life of the upper merchant classes" etc?

"evobility" -- likewise, maybe remove from the blurb in the interest of keeping it easily digestible? "deadly secrets" is pretty good on its own.

Generally, I found the description of Aviana's predicament and path to be a little convoluted, probably because it is trying to summarize what's happening in the first several chapters. I'd maybe step back a level, cast it more in Aviana's voice, and put a big problem in front of her and make it clear why it's deadly but she intends to solve it anyway. The blurb hints at some of the flavor of the world, which is great, and I'd see if you could pull that in without trying to cover the plot too linearly.

Hope that helps! And just my $0.02 (my way of saying my opinions could be wrong, and you can take or discard whatever advice you'd like!)

-Alexander

[Joanna]

Thank you everyone!
This has been very helpful.