REIMAGINING A BETTER QUERYING EXPERIENCE 

Guest post by - Humayun Khan, writer and founder of QueryCats 

Let’s face it.  Querying sucks!  First you have to do research, short-list agents, then tailor your query over and over and over again.  

There’s a lot of rejection or passes and well, it can be pretty darn stress-inducing.  

Of course, nothing compares to the elation of waking up to a full manuscript request, a contract, and that blessed day when you ink your signature and get to put repped by @soandso in your Twitter bio.  

But what if the whole experience could be a little more fun and what’s more fun the getting support from the world’s most loved animal (biased opinion) while you’re on this journey?  

Like many writers, I poured my blood, sweat, and tears into a manuscript for a young adult novel only to get to the querying phase and finding out how hard it was to get representation. 

It’s a very confusing experience. Everything in my gut was telling me that what I wrote was worthy of seeing the light of day in a bookstore. I then discovered it's an entirely different skillset to pitch and market what I wrote in a way that would make it appealing for an agent. 

And I get it, agents are ridiculously busy, underpaid, often working multiple jobs, and working with their existing clients. Reading through queries from unsigned writers is at the bottom of their to-do list.

But I persevered and eventually found the perfect agent who helped shape my manuscript into something that would get picked up by a big publishing house. I never would’ve been able to achieve what I did without her. 

With my experience and day job as a software designer, I wanted to create an agent directory from the ground up that would take some of the sting out the querying process for other writers. That meant creating an application that was easy on the eyes, simple to use, and not something remnant of websites circa 1991. 

My hope for QueryCat is to make it easier for writers to research and shortlist agents while being able to easily track their queries.

You might be wondering, why cats? I think the bigger question is, why not cats? Querying is literally the most stressful experience and if there’s one thing that can help writers get through bleak moments, it’s photos of cats.

Don’t take my word for it, check it out at https://www.querycat.co.

✌ and ♥