So some people have asked me to post up my original query letter for Sucks to Be Me. It’s kind of interesting to see them now, honestly. I hadn’t read them in a while. I’m actually going to post up two different examples (each letter I sent out was a little different, depending on who I was sending it to). These are both from physical snail mail correspondence (I can’t get to my e-mail queries at the moment due to switching laptops).

Here’s one that was to an agent and was more or less a “cold call” — I didn’t know them, hadn’t met them, and didn’t have any personal connection to draw upon. If I did have a connection to draw upon (like being a recommendation from an author I knew, etc., I would have included it as the first paragraph.

Oh, and the title of the book originally (as you can see below), was This Bites. Lots of things have changed since then (total word count, Mina’s age, the number of pageviews YABC gets, you name it. This was back in 2005.)

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Dear [Agent Name]:

“So, I know what you’re going to say. ‘Mina, don’t be silly. Your parents don’t really want you dead.’ But, see, that’s where you’re wrong. Dead wrong. My parents are vampires and now…now, I have to figure out if I want to be a bloodsucker too and continue the family tradition. So don’t tell me you’ve got issues. I’ve got issues.”

Right before her eighteenth birthday, Mina is given an unexpected decision: to suck or not to suck? What to do when you’ve got bigger things to worry about, like finding true love (or at least ‘true like’), finding a date for Prom, and finding yourself? Complicated by required vampire lessons (Geez, vampire homework? What next?) and field trips, love triangles (or is that squares?), and a sardonic but lovable uncle, Mina manages to find some meaning in it all and work out for herself what’s right for her, fangs or no fangs.

This Bites is a completed 57,000 word young adult novel targeted towards readers of Meg Cabot, Daniel Ehrenhaft (his comments so far on my novel, after reading the first few chapters: “You have something really cool here!”), and Sarah Mlynowski. Told in the first person, the tone is light, sarcastic, and comic (similar to the snarkiness of Lulu Dark) — this is no blood and guts vampire novel. Two additional books in the series are planned: This Bites: France Sucks (Mina visits France as a Student Vampire Ambassador, despite the fact she can’t speak French) and This Bites: Vampire U (Mina goes to Vampire college).

You might know me best as my alter-ego, the Young Adult Books Goddess from Young Adult Books Central (www.yabookscentral.com), one of the leading YA lit sites on the Internet with over 160,000 pageviews a month. I have been a reviewer of YA books since 1998 and I specialized in children’s and adolescent literature in college. I regularly work with authors, publishers, and publicists in the genre and consider myself a well-read, if exhausted, individual (I receive approximately 200 – 300 books to review a year).

Per your guidelines, I have enclosed the first 10 pages of my manuscript and an SASE. I look forward to hearing from you. I can be reached via e-mail at kim@yabookscentral.com or via telephone at (xxx) xxx-xxxx.