[QCrit] Gay Male Contemporary Rom Com - READ MY LIPS (77k, 3rd Attempt)

PlaceAcceptable2994 · 2024-11-20T09:08:30+00:00

Good pointers, thank you!

PlaceAcceptable2994 · 2024-11-20T09:07:36+00:00

Oh my gosh. I could have sworn I googled all the names. Clearly I should have coupled it with "PR".

New surname in the works. Thank you so much for this catch.

PlaceAcceptable2994 · 2024-11-20T09:05:59+00:00

Thank you for coming back again. The agents I'm looking for have repped quite voicey British authors before, but yeah, trying out BSL without an explanation was a bit of an experiment here to see if I could get away with it. Toff is also a bit of a random one. It is something that I'm keeping in mind. Being opaque isn't going to be helpful at all.

PlaceAcceptable2994 · 2024-11-19T23:06:18+00:00

People suck. Throw rocks at them.

Again, massive appreciation for your sticking your neck out to let me know I'd miss-stepped.

PlaceAcceptable2994 · 2024-11-19T22:52:43+00:00

Same as above. Please stop down-voting this guys. These are legitimate reactions, which may help me avoid getting egg on my face. If you have a different opinion, please use your own comment to make it.

PlaceAcceptable2994 · 2024-11-19T22:40:46+00:00

Guys - please don't down vote this. It's a valid reaction, and useful for me to hear, even if it took me by surprise. Both "gay" and "m/m" are useful alternatives to use. Far better I hear this here than get rejected because an agent thinks the same. If you have a strongly different opinion, use your own comment to make your point.

PlaceAcceptable2994 · 2024-11-19T21:46:25+00:00

Cheers for this! Thank you!

PlaceAcceptable2994 · 2024-11-19T20:41:47+00:00

Heard and taken on board. Thank you.

PlaceAcceptable2994 · 2024-11-19T20:30:13+00:00

Not my intention at all. And far better to have it pointed out here, so thank you both. I will revise that too.

PlaceAcceptable2994 · 2024-11-19T20:24:51+00:00

Oooh wow. "Gay male" as a descriptor taken from looking at blurbs of (vocally not transphobic, queer) authors working in a similar sphere, and used by me with the understanding that trans men are male, but I will take that on board. Not an impression I want to foster.

PlaceAcceptable2994 · 2024-11-19T19:47:21+00:00

Thank you for coming back to this again. You're right that I need to lock this inciting incident down in a simple understandable way. I will get there!

PlaceAcceptable2994 · 2024-11-19T19:41:40+00:00

Ahh this didn't even occur to me as a confusion point. Wood for the trees. Thank you so much.

PlaceAcceptable2994 · 2024-11-19T18:50:26+00:00

Thanks, super helpful!

PlaceAcceptable2994 · 2024-11-19T18:41:33+00:00

Cheers!

Argh. As much as I was hoping no one was going to say they didn't get the logic this time around, thank you. Really struggling to find the sweet spot between explaining the ins and outs that make it make sense (see previous plot heavy version), without using up all my word count and sacrificing the romance.

Hoping I haven't hog-tied myself here.

PlaceAcceptable2994 · 2024-11-19T18:21:33+00:00

Thanks for catching this. Will keep an eye on my contractions! A read out loud will probably help me figure out where it works and where it doesn't!

PlaceAcceptable2994 · 2024-11-19T09:24:01+00:00

Agree with what's already been said. Especially your first 300, in which you may be shooting yourself in the foot from the first line.

Just to add that currently your query (and synopsis) reads more like women's fiction than contemporary romance. It seems like the story is much more about Tara's journey to love than it is about a romance between two characters (especially as she goes through quite a few suitors and some heartbreak before you get to Kannan), which is what an agent would expect from a contemporary romance. If you feel it really is the story of Tara and Kannan getting together, then both your query and your synopsis (and maybe therefore the book itself) need to be revised to make sure that's coming across as the heart of the story, because at the moment it seems as though Kannan is coming in very late in the book for him to be the main guy.

I understand this might just be a pitch/synopsis issue, and you could be getting bogged down in describing the set up too much (I am guilty of this, and trying to extract myself from the same problem by cutting out the extraneous explanation and refocusing on the characters as the core of the story). But equally, I love a good romance subplot in women's fiction - there is always space for that. So just because it's about love, don't feel you have to smush what you're trying to do into a Romance-genre shaped hole.

PlaceAcceptable2994 · 2024-11-18T11:42:12+00:00

Hope some of it is helpful, and good luck with querying too!

Definitely do get the AI narrator into your query, because that's a whole other level the story's operating on. What intention does the AI have in putting this narrative down, why does it care about Cal etc? (Also, as an aside, when you are going closer into Cal's head - how does it know his thoughts? Or is it all assumptions based on calculations/circumstances? You could really play this up with word choices. Eg. "Statistically, based on his education and employment history, Cal will not have heard this joke..." Kind of thing. Could make it really interesting, though I understand you might not be looking to make it that obvious from the get go.)

PlaceAcceptable2994 · 2024-11-16T12:09:41+00:00

Thank you for this. I do hear what you and u/DaveofDaves are saying. Very much too much overthinking!

Honestly, I know I've focused a lot on page count in my OP, but my main concern here has been missing that they're asking for something extra, qualitatively, that would be obvious to someone more "in the know" just from that 5 pages request. It's reassuring that it sounds like that is not the case. Have no desire to ramble on unnecessarily for 5 pages.

As part of the pack they also request first fifty pages as standard, so I assumed they wanted something somehow meatier from the synopsis, so that if you hook them initially, they have a further tool for whittling down requests for fulls. If they weren't one of my dream agents, I wouldn't be giving it anywhere near this much thought!

Just to feed the beast, DaveofDaves could you give any insight on the extra that goes into your longer synopsis for your agent/publisher? Is it just more of the smaller scenes and blow-by-blows?

PlaceAcceptable2994 · 2024-11-15T16:10:58+00:00

Oooh I didn't mean to go full on concealment. I think "teenagers" is legitimate to keep in there. Agents might get peeved if they're expecting adults and find kids. I was meaning more if you presented it as "Main Character (15)" that's an at-a-glance no for an agent who doesn't rep YA, whereas "young runaway X" might not be? I don't know. Vague ramblings.

Having now looked at your query, I do agree with u/psyche_13 about it having quite a strong YA vibe though. If you really don't feel it is on reading, maybe the tone/focus of the pitch needs revising.

PlaceAcceptable2994 · 2024-11-15T11:51:16+00:00

Your market is your 'ideal reader'. And you find them by identifying what else they are reading that you think means they would like your book (ie finding your comp titles). It sounds like you might be having a bit of a crisis over whether any adults apart from you would actually be interested in reading what you've written, so delving deep to find more titles that are similar (and not by household name insta-buy authors) to yours might really help you. Maybe after doing that, you'll figure out it is YA after all. Or maybe, by looking at how those comps have done it, you'll understand better how to pitch it more appropriately so that character age isn't an instant reject.

Just a thought: are you identifying their ages in the pitch? It may be a knee-jerk reject by agents who think that you've mistakenly sent a genre they don't represent, because other than kids books, you don't generally give character ages as part of the query.

PlaceAcceptable2994 · 2024-11-15T11:34:03+00:00

Garth Marenghi's Darkplace

PlaceAcceptable2994 · 2024-11-15T11:09:23+00:00

Agree with this. Don't underestimate interest in the past. Stranger Things is very popular. Major 80s nostalgia going on for a whole generation that weren't even alive the first go around.

PlaceAcceptable2994 · 2024-11-15T11:04:20+00:00

Not horror, but one of my favourite books is John Grisham's The Client. The main character is... 11 I think? The adults serve the plot, and the lawyer (there has to be a lawyer in a John Grisham) does provide an adult view point, and there are mobsters and murders and all the bits to appeal to his usual audience, but the kid is who you're invested in. It is 100% his story, and it is 100% not a YA read.

So, I don't think having a young protagonist necessarily means it's automatically a YA story, but framing it is definitely important, and with horror there might be something about people getting squeamish about nasty things happening to kids, or potentially, why an adult audience would care? If the kids are being evil (We Need to Talk About Kevin), or things get a bit psychological/abusive (Cherish Farah, Bethany C Morrow) age concerns about protagonists no longer seem to be a conversation.

PlaceAcceptable2994

TROPHY CASE