At this Manuscript Academy consultation, literary agent Jessica Sinsheimer and co-founder Julie Kingsley sat down with five writers and did something most craft content skips entirely: they showed their actual thinking, out loud, while reading a real query cold.
You’ll watch a YA retelling of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis get reshaped around a single missing image. You’ll watch a popular philosophy book find its “who is this actually for” in real time, after floating at 10,000 feet for a few too many paragraphs. You’ll watch a Persuasion-inspired romance get its emotional gut punch identified line by line. You’ll see a fantasy query get told to lead with friendship instead of plot mechanics, and a dystopian romantic suspense get pointed straight at the anxiety underneath it.
None of this is theoretical. These are working writers with real submission histories, real rejection counts, and real questions, getting notes they can use tonight. If you’ve ever wondered what an agent is actually thinking when your query lands in their inbox, or wanted to watch a professional editor find the one sentence that changes everything, this is that, unscripted and in full.
Bring a notebook. You’ll leave with more usable query advice than most paid courses hand you in a month, and a much clearer sense of what “specific” actually means on the page.
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About the Instructor
Jessica Sinsheimer View Faculty Page
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). She’d love more of what she thinks of as “Rom Com 2.0” works–powerful, nerdy women with humor and heart. More underrepresented characters, please–especially those with power, agency, and happy endings.