Q&A Thursday

HELLO!

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS DAY!

A asks: As most querying writers, I seem to be double guessing and over-thinking every.single.thing. in my query letter. Often, your newsletter or another publishing pro’s post or comments will hold the answer to my question du jour, but here’s one I haven’t seen yet: if your novel is told in dual or multiple POV, does it need to be specified in the query letter? I have a twofold conundrum with this:

1. I’ve read many times that multiple POV for a debut is a turn off for a lot of agents and acquiring editors, because it’s not easy to pull off. So it’s tempting for me to leave this info out of the letter so as not to get an automatic rejection. 

2. If I don’t specify in my query letter that I wrote a multiple POV novel, will the agent feel blindsided and annoyed when they realize it is? (which they would if they requested the first 10 pages with the query, but not the first 5)

Bonus question: should I re-write my novel to narrow it down to at least dual POV? Neither my two critique partners nor my various beta readers had issues with or negatively commented on the POV changes in my manuscript (the story’s timeline is linear), and of course it can be done successfully, but as much as I’d love to be the next Emily St John Mandel, I also don’t want to shoot myself in the foot from the get go. 

Your thoughts would be immensely appreciated. 

1. You will not get automatically rejected if your debut novel is multi-POV. If someone said that to you, tell me their name so I can go yell at them. Now, some editors and agents may find that early-career writers have trouble with multi-POV books, because yes! they are hard! But this is not a case where an agent or editor sees that it’s multi-POV and that it’s your debut and they write you off completely. That doesn’t actually happen as often as you think/fear it does.
2. And will an agent feel blindsided when they discover your book is multi-POV while reading, but you didn’t say so in the query? Maybe? If your second POV comes early enough in the narrative, probably not. But also, I think it’s ok and even advisable to say your book is multi-POV in your query. It’s not a red flag!
3. Should you rewrite your novel to just two POVs? Now, just how many POVs are we talking here??? If I saw a query for something that said it had 87 POVs, this might stand out (in a bad way) to me, not because of the specific number of POVs, but probably because I wouldn’t want to read a story structured like that. Are there books that do that, and well? Yes. But maybe that’s not for me. You should still say it in the query letter because it really could be for someone else! Regardless, I’d dip into the story to check it out because the writing or the plot could suck me in and make me not care about a storytelling element I thought I might not like. I don’t have to experience all 87 POV characters to know if I want to read a query sample for a little while. There are lots of other ways a book can draw me in, even if on the surface I’m not sure I’d like it. AND ALSO, you don’t want to be represented or work with the readers who are like too many POVs ewwwww. They are not your readers. That is ok.