I remember when I was a young girl, idly flipping through the pages of my father’s comic books. (Yes, my father. My brothers, fearing girl cooties, wouldn’t let me touch theirs.) I always found the ads more entertaining than the actual comic. In addition to the X-ray glasses, the itching powder, and the sea monkeys vividly portrayed as living a much more glamorous life than anyone I’ve known before or since, I still recall the astounding money-making machine. All you did was insert a blank piece of paper into the machine, turn the crank, and WOW! Out came a genuine one dollar bill!

Lately I’ve received a rash of emails peddling query letter services (QLS). There seem to be almost as many of them as there are companies claiming they can enlarge a body part I don’t have. For a certain amount of money, the QLS will write your query letter and submit it to editors and agents for you. Frequently the QLS will mention bestselling authors who received hundreds of rejections before finally selling, or they tack on lists of recent, highly lucrative book deals. The QLS does not claim these successes as the result of their miracle service—they just casually insert them to make you think they are.

Those annoying query letters! You spend hours at the computer slaving over them, struggling to compress your 100k word opus into 75 words or less. You waste valuable time proofreading them, printing envelopes, checking and rechecking names and addresses, losing sleep wondering if you remembered to put a stamp on that SASE, and all you get for your trouble is another lousy rejection! Let a QLS do it all for you—you just kick back, roast some wienies with your friends, open a few cans of Pepsi, put on some Bee Gees, and wait for the offers to roll in. Or so the QLS ads would have you believe.

Just for kicks (and because I needed an excuse to put off writing my synopsis for last month’s TARA workshop), I visited one of these websites. Their bait was to do something like one free or reduced rate query submission for you, and once you were knocked off your feet by the barrage of offers, you’d be slavering to sign over your life savings. All you had to do was fill out a few blanks on the web page, hit the send button, and presto! Run for cover, Messrs. King and Brown!

The blanks asked for title of book, genre, word count, etc, the usual stuff editors and agents always like to know. Then I saw the blank where the author was instructed to provide a brief description of his or her story—with a caveat to use no more than 1,000 characters. How many people agonize over filling that out before they finally wake up to smell the raw sewage? If their sinuses (or maybe it’s just their senses) are severely congested, I assume that eventually they put something in that blank, hit the send button—and find themselves the wienie being roasted.

What many people don’t realize is this QLS is like the amazing machine from the comic books that cranks out genuine dollar bills from blank pieces of paper. Just like it! The principle is the same: For the machine (or QLS) to produce what you want, first you have to provide that very thing—whether it’s your own dollar bill or that same query letter you’ve been struggling to write and perfect. Both scams prey on those looking for a quick and easy way to get what they want, when, in fact, there is no quick and easy way to make money . . . or to get published. If there were, we’d all be filthy rich NYT bestsellers living like sea monkeys.

And those promises you’ll be bombarded with offers in no time? Those are only offers to review a sample of your work. Big deal. I’ve long since lost count of how many query letters I’ve written and sent out myself—only to get a request for a partial or even a full. One actually resulted in a sale to an RWA-recognized publisher.

So what exactly is the QLS offering that I cannot do myself? That I HAVE been doing myself, for years? And at no extra expense to He Who Brings Home the Bacon. Why would I want to pay hundreds of dollars to someone else for all the hard work I still have to do on my own? Yet sadly, a fair number of aspiring authors must be falling for it, or these scams would go away.

If you receive these emails, delete them. Urge your friends to delete them. Work hard, polish not only your manuscript, but your synopsis and query; keep submitting, keep trying, and eventually you’ll succeed for a lot less money than if you let the QLS pretend to do it all for you.

And if you still want the sea monkeys, you can save on the shipping costs from New Jersey by buying them at any local bait shop.

Now go write.

Avoid Those Writing Scams

Karen Lingefelt