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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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What's up, everyone? This is Cece. So I recently grabbed lunch with an acquiring editor from HarperCollins who told me that the number of submissions she's been getting has nearly doubled. And I wasn't surprised at all because every agent and editor I know has been talking about how the volume of submission keeps increasing.
So personally, that is a wonderful thing, because it's more reading for me, but it also means I have more chances of matching with authors. I consider it a privilege to review queries on Books with Hooks, and of course, in my submissions inbox. But at the same time, I talk to writers who tell me that they wish agents would read more than a few pages because...
And I quote, my story gets better in chapter two. I have to be honest, this kills me. It's like me wanting chocolate chip cookies to have the nutritional value of kale. It's just not realistic. Like it or not, no agent, no acquiring editor is going to stick around to see if a submission gets better. It's not because we're mean. It's because we get dozens and dozens every day.
I know it's harsh, but ambitious writers embrace harsh realities. So here it goes. It's your job to make your opening pages irresistible, to make agents crave it, to make agents want to read more. That's why I'm so excited about my upcoming course, Starting It Right. How to begin your story in the best place and in the best way. I created this course after studying hundreds of books.
I've mapped out elements that are present in the beginning of all successful novels and memoirs. And I've designed checklists, actual checklists, that you can use to ensure that your story's beginning is seducing your reader.
we'll cover how to write a great first line different types of beginnings and how you can choose the best one the best place to start and the best way to start yes these are totally different things when it makes sense to add a prologue and when it doesn't how to frame your inciting incident in an appealing way
how to balance exposition and mystery, how to include context but not weigh it down with too much backstory, and what to do if your story has more than one POV or timeline. Most of all, I'm going to show you how to make readers want to turn to chapter two. Join me for this multi-day course designed to help you break through the noise.
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Chapter 2: What is the premise of the satirical body horror query?
Blanca Moore, quickly nearing 30 and stuck in a soul-sucking job to afford her even more soul-crushing debt, wants to be an influencer. When her long-term boyfriend dumps her for not paying enough attention to him, I guess the male loneliness epidemic is real, she's determined to enter her 30s as a new woman.
Being a hashtag-certified corporate girly, she creates a detailed plan to achieve all of her goals. Start dating again, get an Ozempic, and hold the party of the year, a funeral for her 20s. But when a mysteriously gifted skincare product shows up on her doorstep that promises to transform her life, she jumps at the opportunity.
Desperate for beauty, validation, and digital relevance, she applies it with little suspicion, only to discover that it causes a small, insatiable mouth to grow on her stomach. As her online infamy grows, so does her hunger. And the only thing that will solve it and complete her transformation? The flesh of a man.
With her lavishly themed birthday party looming, which she swears will go viral, Blanca must confront the monstrous version of herself she's created before it consumes everything she has left. I earned a Bachelor of Arts in English and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, which taught me how to turn my weird ideas into delectable stories.
I'm a nearly 30-year-old Latina woman navigating spaces entirely made for men while trying to balance the unobtainable beauty standards that society continues to impose. I wrote Mouthpiece as a way to give voice to the perils of aging and a desire to understand where the line between validation and value diverges. My internalized rage, mainly at the patriarchy, lives on these pages.
I look forward to hearing from you. Best regards, Marisol.
Thank you, Cece. I continue to hear horror as horror. But I'm more inclined to pick up the book if I hear horror than horror. So there we are, you know. There you go. It's a marketing strategy. I dig it.
So I want to ask you both because I don't know if this is a generational thing and because I'm 50, but, and I know it's on Instagram, the girly thing, the hashtag girly or people getting high girlies, but it drives me insane. Being called a girly, like actually makes me not want to buy any product, pick up anything.
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Chapter 3: How do agents view the increasing volume of submissions?
Is this because I'm old and grumpy? Carly and Cece, how do you guys feel about it?
I mean, it's the infantilization of women to make them think that they need the thing, even though they don't need the thing. And it's like, well, if you want to be young, then you're a girly. So it's like, you're just not being tricked. I think this is a good thing. Bianca will not be tricked.
Bianca will not be tricked.
Is it that or are we taking back the word to empower ourselves like bitch? Because I'll sit down at lunch with all my friends and be like, hello, bitches. So I don't know if it's that or if it is the infantilization. So I need younger women to explain it to me.
I think it depends on the audience. Okay. I definitely think that the evil powers that be are trying to infantilize women. But I also believe that like anything, language is a fluid thing, living thing. And there are situations where you can do it to empower yourself, but it doesn't work on every audience and nor should it. Nothing that is interesting is universally liked.
Marketing doesn't mean you just blanket market to half the population also. Like it is a subset, which you will not be fooled.
I will not be fooled, people. So, Cece, what did you think of the query? How many words were in there? Let's go.
So 360 words started off really strong, you know, because we got comps. We have a strong title. The word count is on the shorter side. But at the same time, people have declining attention spans. And I quite like a Pacey novel. So I'm OK with that. Yeah, I understand why she would submit this to me. It's really great.
I also really like the first plot paragraph because it establishes the protagonist's place in the world. Like I know what Blanca Moore is up against. It's very important in a query letter to establish your protagonist's place in the world at the beginning of the story, not the place in the planet Earth's world, their world, right?
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Chapter 4: What makes an opening page irresistible to agents?
Okay. That's what I thought too. She does say on, but like, I'm not entirely sure. And then like, What's the upside of that? Because it is kind of weird and gross, which I know is the point here to have a mouth on your stomach. My question is like, what's the upside?
Because I know she says desperate for beauty, validation, digital relevance, but I'm not getting like what she's getting out of this. This makes me think of the substance with Demi Moore. I think everyone's going to think of the substance, right? Like I think that's the natural association. And I have issues with that movie because of the major plot hole that no one talks about.
I'm the only one who cares. On the trailer for that movie, trailer, the promise is clear. Like she gets to spend one week as a younger woman. What is the trade-off here? Like I get that her online infamy grows, but it's infamy. And then there's a reference to the only thing that will complete her transformation is the flesh of a man. Like complete her transformation into what?
Like, is it to get rid of the visible mouth? Is it to become, I guess, more attractive? But I just want a lot of specificity with the transformation because this is a story that hinges on me understanding why someone would pay a cost, a very specific cost to achieve a very specific gain.
And I suspect that the storyteller is holding back on telling us the specifics because she doesn't want spoilers. And I empathize. But at the same time, everything before the climax is fair game. And I would just urge you to be more specific because remember, agents review queries and batches. We're looking at 50 queries at the same time or more.
We get a lot of stories where it's like, oh, there's this transformation that's going to take place, but the cost is really high. What about your story makes it unique and special? And it's your job to highlight that in the query letter. I will say that the idea of a funeral for your 20s is very cool. I wish I had known about that because I totally would have thrown one. That sounds awesome.
It's dark and weird. And I like that. I also really like the author bio. She has internalized rage and so do I. Of all the seven sins, wrath, for sure my number one, even more than gluttony, and I eat a lot. So yeah, I feel you, author. I also have rage, and I appreciate you mentioning that in the query letter.
Thank you, Cece. I, too, love weird parties. A friend of mine, when she called off her engagement in her 20s, had a what-the-fuck-was-I-thinking party.
Oh, love that.
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Chapter 5: What are the crucial elements in writing a compelling query letter?
It sounds dramatic. And then you're like, what does this even mean? Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Like you can't unpack it. There's no meat. That's vague.
Exactly. And for two seconds, if you're reading it, you go, oh, impactful. But then you go, actually, not really. And I mean, A, agents have a really good BS barometer. Yeah, yeah. We can spot empty impact lines better than the average person. But also B, like... when you're reading 50 query letters, the impact lines just lose there. Do you know what I'm saying?
Like meat and substance is the most important thing in a query letter. It can't be smoke and mirrors. And I think AI does smoke and mirrors, but Hey, I could be wrong, you know?
Meat is important in your query letter because of the stomach mouth thingy.
The stomach needs to be fed. We need to be fed great query letters. So, okay. So I think I'm not advocating. I want to be very clear. I am not advocating for people to be writing their query letters with AI. I would be hard pressed to know for sure whether there are people that listen to this that are not doing that, you know, either way. So, yeah.
So if anybody is ever going to use AI to do this, know that the empty impact statements are what is going to sewer you. Because you could be thinking, oh, I asked AI to write me a query letter like, you know, this best-selling novel. But... What it's going to do is regurgitate things, be unclear and sound great and not actually get to the heart of your project.
So do not put your material into AI. All of you that are rolling your eyes at me while you're driving your car, eyes on the road because we need you to write the best query letter that you can. And we will still be here to help you guys with your query letters because that is our job. Okay, back to this query letter at hand.
In the second line, you say, based on your interest in acquiring fiction, just a reminder that agents don't acquire. Like we sign clients and acquiring is a very specific word. Acquiring is what editors do when they buy the book for the publisher. So just FYI, acquiring is a really tricky word here. So don't use it.
Okay. Okay. I just need to interrupt. A lot of agents put it, put on their wishlist. I'm looking to acquire blah, blah, blah. Like she's probably just copying what like a billion agents do. Okay. Yeah. Just say, just say, okay, listen, we're disagreeing.
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Chapter 6: How does the author balance exposition and mystery in their story?
And I'm just saying that the author is probably like imitating or emulating what she sees.
Okay. Another reason why this podcast will never die is because we have so many opinions and we do not speak for everybody. I will just flag that as a yellow flag. Let's go with the yellow flag there for the term acquiring fiction. All right. There are way too many comps. Four comps is a lot of comps. That's a lot of comps. So I think we need to kind of narrow that down a little bit.
And I think the substance like Cece talked about is an obvious omission here.
Carly, can I just jump in without making you lose your train of thought? Something that I'm finding fascinating now that we've started the meet your dream agent segment in our Tuesday sub stack where we interview different agents so that our listeners can get to know them better is how many of them say that when they tap out of a query letter is because of bad comps.
comps that don't fit with the genre etc and i was honestly thinking it would be something else like the plot paragraph and so many of them are saying these comps don't make any sense i'm tapping out so it shows you how important the comps are all right i feel like that's the thing that we have i mean there's a lot of things we've like tried to like hammer home with our audience over the years i hope our long-term listeners know how strongly we feel about comps for all of those reasons
It's so important in your understanding of your place within the larger marketplace, where you want to go, what your goals are, how you see things. Cece, why are you rolling your eyes at me?
It's not at you. I'm thinking of something really bad I want to say, but I'm like, don't say it.
When we're done recording, we can gossip. No, I'm going to say it.
You know what I think? Whenever an agent says that, whenever an agent says, oh, I tap out because of the comms, I go do it so I can take the project for me. Because I have signed people with terrible comps.
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Chapter 7: What are the specific stakes of the protagonist's transformation?
And in this case, it, in my opinion, doesn't because it's a little too mundane, a little too on the nose.
literally the first two paragraphs and you guys know i'm a fan of interiority but it's essentially her going through her situation you know like she's in debt she has nothing to show for her life jordan is her stable boyfriend he she makes a lot more money than than he does she loves to say that whenever they fight he does more things around the house they're a modern couple she needs time to post on tiktok she aims to post three times a day even though her
Views aren't getting, like, this is all like two paragraphs.
But Cece, do you actually think this is interiority? Like you just called this interiority. I actually don't think this is very interior.
So my definition of interiority, and this is where it depends on the jargon you use, is access to your protagonist's psyche as they process information in an interesting way. So anything that's not neutral, like you walk into a room and you go, there is a green couch, that's not interiority. A CCTV camera could capture that. But if you say it's an ugly green couch, that's an opinion.
Therefore, it's interiority. So I agree with you that a lot of people wouldn't consider this. It's like a CC thing. It's exposition, but interiority can be exposition. Interiority can also not be. Does that answer your question?
Yeah, I'm just like, I don't know if you've answered my question. Do you think this is doing the job of what you consider interiority?
The interesting part, no. It is access to her psyche as she processes information. Yeah. But it's not doing the interesting part. So, you know, no, in that sense. But yes, in the sense of what she's trying to do. Because I believe that the storyteller thinks this is interesting, right? So I think I'm addressing her intent and her effort.
She... And again, I know that if you're writing a story where the whole plot hinges on a woman being unhappy in her life, being...
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Chapter 8: How do the characters' motivations drive the narrative?
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