The Writer's Digest Guide to Query Letters

Lesson learned. Don't grab Writer's Digest books only because of the title. Actually take a moment to flip through them to make sure you know what you're getting. At least I learned something from The Writer's Digest Guide to Query Letters.

Well, maybe that's a bit too harsh. I'm sure that someone could learn quite a lot from this book. But here's the problem that I ran into: the book is mainly geared for freelance writers hoping to query magazines about articles. There is information in there about querying book publishers and agents, but it's buried toward the back.

The other problem is that the information is very, very basic. Beginner stuff, really. I'm not saying I'm an expert on writing query letters, but the information contained in this book was stuff I had picked up from other books, articles, and classes. In other words, it was largely repeated.

So if you're a beginning writer, this is the one for you. If you're not, you probably know what this book offers already.