Writing Query Letters

One of the things that an MFA doesn't really prepare you for very well (at least none of the people I've ever talked to about it, and including the program I attended) is the actual day-to-day business side of writing. There's a lot of focus on craft, and I both understand and appreciate that, but I think there should be a tad more effort spent on the basic nuts and bolts of being a working writer beyond the need to sit down and start typing.

Because let's face it: writing a query letter or otherwise networking and getting your book/article/collection out there is hard, and an entirely different skill set than crafting a truly great poem or a gripping novel. I'm not a troubled artist or brooding drama diva, but I am an introvert, and even if I'm confident in my writing ability and my novel's worth as a piece of art, it takes a great deal of emotional effort to move to contacting agents, figuring out how to distill my 300-page novel into a paragraph elevator pitch, learning the ins-and-outs of the publishing industry well enough that I don't sabotage myself, etc.

I'm taking the next few weeks to prepare query letters for agents, as I shop my novel Dragonlines around. This will be my third effort, but by far the most ambitious. My target is to have 50 letters sent out over two weeks. Wish me luck!

Cheers! --Rusty