Queries That Say Nothing Will Be Rejected

Last weekend, I was reading through submissions and I found myself passing on so many authors for a reason that could have easily been fixed. The authors simply didn't tell me anything about their stories. OK, they told me something, but honestly, not enough, which left it up to me to fill in the gaps with what "I thought" the book might be about. Of course, what I thought might not have been what the book was really about. And therein lies the problem. You were just rejected and there is no coming back from that. 

I get it, query letters are tough, but you have to give us something to work with to really make a decision. I don't want to get into the full query letter writing subject here. I do that a lot on this blog, but I do want to focus on what I am seeing and how it is wrong.

Consider this...

I am presenting to you my novel Weeds in the Grass, a contemporary work beautifully set in urban America taking the reader on a journey of the exploration of the soul. Our characters face challenges that will give the reader a moment to pause and think about her own life and how she is dealing with families, her work and her own soul. As Emily works daily on her yardwork, we have a chance to grow and learn through her internal thoughts. This 75,000 word women's fiction novel is comparable to stories of self-help and spiritual novels of the ages and something this world truly needs.

OK, Wow! This person spent a lot of time wordsmithing this pile of verbiage that tells me nothing other than I just fell asleep reading it (actually, I almost fell asleep making this up as I wrote it). 

Do we have any sense of a plot, theme or character? Do we have any purpose? No. If I see this, I have to take a guess of what the reader might be getting at her. I am assuming this is a story, maybe in a literary fiction voice, although it might lean in the direction of a Jodi Picoult (maybe????) Maybe this is in 1st person, although I could clearly see this being written in some obscure weird 3rd person as the author is trying to be "intelligent" sounding (based entirely on the blurb). I am guessing that this person is likely going to spend a lot of time info-dumping trivia about her gardening knowledge and using Latin terms for the herbs in the garden (maybe). And I am also betting that we might have someone who is going to dump more baggage in this story than someone on a 4 day cruise that doesn't know how to pack. 

What I do know is that I am not going to waste my time asking for a synopsis from this person just to find out more about the story because if the blurb reads like this, getting the synopsis for the story is going to be equally as worse and will read more like James Joyce's Finnigan's Wake:

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The point I want to make is simple. Tell me about your story in the query. Tell me the basics:

• Title, genre, word count, high concept
• Basic plot with characters, conflict and setting
• Who you are and where your career is heading.

That's it.