Do you ever have questions you can’t Google (because everyone disagrees, or they’re too complicated, or you just want a reliable answer right now)?
Ask our Help Desk! This month, agent Jessica Sinsheimer (Context Literary) answers member questions on:
- Querying a new book while an older one still has full requests out
- Requerying an agent after a big revision
- Choosing a genre label for blended books
- What “book club” fiction means now
- Pitching a myth-inspired story that isn’t a retelling
- Using TV shows as comps
- Hinting at later plot twists in your query and pitch
- How long a query letter should be
- Querying a duology
- Omniscient POV versus close interiority
- High word counts, and telling YA from adult
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About the Instructor
Jessica Sinsheimer
Jessica Sinsheimer has been reading and campaigning for her favorite queries since 2004. Now an agent at the Context Literary Agency, she is always on the lookout for new writers, and–whatever the age group–she tends to love contrast: highbrow sentences and lowbrow content, beautiful settings and ugly motives–the books that are beautiful and scary, heartbreaking and hilarious. She loves secrets, scheming, revenge, plotting–and stories that have to be written forward and backward to make sense (SHE LOVES discovering a very cleverly planted clue that makes sense in retrospect). Please send works with underrepresented characters with power, agency, and happy endings.
She is especially eager to find upmarket genre fiction–works between commercial and literary that raise big questions in thriller, fantasy, speculative, horror, book club, romance–and works that are a blend of at least two of these.