Q&A Thursday

Automatic Rejection Edition

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.