It’s quite possible that I’ve gone nuts, but what the heck? Here goes nothing.

Those of you who read my blog or are SCBWI members, know that over the last two years, I have studied query writing pretty intensely and when I was querying for agents, I had a pretty good partial/full request rate, which I attribute to my queries. Recently I have helped three writers with their queries. All three writers had previously written a query that they had received multiple rejections on before asking me for help. After working one-on-one with these three writers, their new queries all generated requests for partials/fulls. This has gotten me thinking about the whole elevator thing.

I once heard someone talking about how when you are in the movie biz, once people reach the top floor, they never send the elevator down to you, no matter how good of friends you might’ve been when you were both at the bottom floor. I am determined to send that elevator down every chance I get. Right now, I’m probably only on the fifth floor out of a hundred, but there are still people on floors 1-4 that I can help.

If you have a query letter that has received at least five rejections from agents, and you want some help, please send me a note through the Contact page. If you are just starting writing a query and still want some help, I’m open to that too, but I’m especially interested in helping people who have one that definitely isn’t working. You have to have a letter of some sort though as a jumping off place. Please do NOT send your query letter yet! Thanks!

I offer no guarantees, either on how soon I can get to your query (maybe I’ll get one request for help, maybe a hundred) or that your query will go on to generate requests for partials/fulls. But if you’re interested in getting some feedback, and are willing to at least CONSIDER what I have to say and do some of the exercises I’ve basically stolen from other people and put together to sort of create my own teaching technique, then maybe we can get your elevator on the move.

And if you want help from someone who’s a lot closer to the top floor, then drop over to agent Kristin Nelson’s blog where she’s done a long series on how to write the query letter.