I don’t know why, but I’ve recently been hit with a barrage of requests from new writers who want me to critique their query letters. Most of them come from LinkedIn, which I’ve happily ignored for years, but for some reason I’m suddenly getting 5-10 daily requests to “connect.” And lots of requests for freebies.

I tell them Ruth and I have a very strict policy of NO FREE CRITIQUES of queries or anything else. With over 20,000 subscribers, followers, FB friends, etc, we’d be dead from overwork and/or starvation in a week.  We do provide the information on this blog absolutely free—without any advertising, except for a mention of our books. But we need time to write the books that pay the bills.

We also get daily queries from writers who want a guest post or book review. (We do not write book reviews.)

I even got a Tweet this week asking for a review in response to somebody’s RT of my post on BookBub reviews. (That author might get a special bad query prize.)

So today I’m going to give the advice I would have given all those clueless queriers if I’d had time. If writers follow this advice, I promise your queries will be head and shoulders above 99% of the ones I see.

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