b. title: COPY PASTE
c. contact info:
Why you put this at the top of your query letter I do not know. It goes at the bottom, and not in bullet point form.
Address
Phone
Twitter:
website
And this goes under your closing.
Another gunshot, another day for Chicago police detective Lauren Medina—until a murder investigation leads not to a street gang scuffle but a supernatural pact for the soul of the city and its youth. All of them.
This is so abstract it's not very interesting. That's death in a query. It's instant death after you put all your contact info and housekeeping stuff at the top of the query, because at this point I assume you haven't done a lick of research on how to query.
When you query an agent you're saying you're ready to suit up and work in a new industry. You want the agent to take you seriously, to believe you've done your homework and prepared for the "job interview" of a query. To that end you've researched correct query format, and the PURPOSE of a query which is to -- all together now -- entice an agent to read your work.
Because you're smart you understand that enticing is not even close to uninteresting. You read your first paragraph and think, "would I want to read this if I hadn't written it." You might even show this to a writer friend. If the response is anything other than "hey, I want to read this!" you know you're not there yet.
You're not there yet.
When Medina arrests two teens for the attempted murder of a classmate, she’s not surprised by their crime or even their strange behavior, but the odd graffiti that starts showing up at murder scenes around town—signed by the Pied Piper.
Those two parts of the sentence don't seem connected. She arrests two teens. Is there graffiti at that murder scene? If there is, Medina notices it there, not "around town."
This leads Medina away from the usual suspects and toward a dark tale come to life. If she can’t save the kids of Chicago from sacrificing each other at the Pied Piper’s delight in exchange for their own deepest desires, she’ll have to make a pact with the demon herself to save the one young man she won’t let the Pied Piper take.
How is she led away from the usual suspects (which doesn't mean what you're using it here for) if she has two suspects in custody? How is "a dark tale come to life" a suspect?
And this is where I stop reading. It's entirely abstract and cliche. "Deepest desires" "pact with the demon" are all overused and under enticing.
Specificity is your friend. What is the Pied Piper doing? Why are the kids following him? How do the murders fit in with this?
Copy Paste is complete at 62,000 words. It’s an adult horror novel based on the Brother's Grimm tale.
If this is based on the Grimm tale, where are the rats? They don't have to be actual rats, but something brings the Pied Piper to Hamelin, and in your story, I don't have any idea what it is, or how Medina is part of it. The Grimm tale is about people failing to honor their obligations. I don't get any sense of that here.
When you base something on earlier work, you don't have to slavishly follow the plot of the original work, but the theme (which you should NOT mention in a query!) should be similar.
The plot of Beowulf and First Blood by David Morell are not similar, but the theme is. You need to show me the theme of this book is close to the original tale and you do that by telling me about the plot. Tricky, right?
This query doesn't do the job right now.
Go back to the basics.
Who is the main character. What does she want. What's keeping her from getting it? What will she have to sacrifice/how will she have to change to get what she wants.
For those of you who noticed the word count and wonder if it's low: it's not. Horror is generally shorter than other kinds of novels.
