Workshops

Query Confidential: Secrets of a Winning Pitch
Oct
21

Query Confidential: Secrets of a Winning Pitch

A 90-minute online workshop introducing the traditional query letter structure and helping you ensure you’re hitting all the marks for your book and your agent! Because we all know agents are the gatekeepers to the industry, and a good query is the key to unlocking the gate. Taught by by New York Times bestselling author, editor, and #queriesaremysuperpower marketer Jenna Blum.

In this 90-minute online workshop, Jenna Blum will share an example of a traditionally structured four-part query that succeeded in landing its author a contract with a Big 5 publisher. She’ll walk participants through it paragraph by paragraph, taking Q&A throughout to ensure everyone feels comfortable creating their own queries. The workshop will conclude with a 15-minute AMA (“ask me anything”).

*Please note: this is a how-to-write-your-query workshop, not a how-to-submit-to-agents workshop! We’ll be focusing essential first step–crafting a strong query–rather than the next step of researching and contacting agents. For that important part of the journey, refer to TBR–whose Publishing Matchmaker program is waiting for you!

**Jenna also works individually with clients to create and troubleshoot their query letters. Her usual fee is $150/ query, but participants of this workshop can book Jenna individually and receive feedback on their queries by October 24 for a special rate of $75 / query. Information about booking one-on-one query support will be sent via email after workshop registration.

JENNA BLUM is the New York Times and internationally bestselling author of novels Those Who Save Us, The Stormchasers, and The Lost Family; the novella “The Lucky One” in the collection Grand Central; and memoir Woodrow on the Bench, about her senior black Lab and what his last seven months taught her, now in paperback from Harper Collins. Jenna is one of Oprah’s Top Thirty Women Writers, with her work published in over 20 countries, and cofounder/CEO of literary social media marketing company A Mighty Blaze. Jenna’s New York Times and internationally bestselling first novel, Those Who Save Us, won the Ribalow Prize, awarded by Hadassah Magazine and adjudged by Elie Wiesel; Jenna interviewed Holocaust survivors for the Steven Spielberg Survivors of the Shoah Foundation for five years. Jenna is a public speaker, traveling nationally and internationally; for her 1st novel, she visited over 800 book clubs in the Boston area alone. Jenna is based in Boston, where she has taught at Grub Street Writers for over 20 years; she earned her M.A. in Creative Writing from Boston University and was the fiction editor for AGNI Literary Magazine. For more information about Jenna and to share her real-time adventures, please follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

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