Have you ever heard of Gwen Hayes’s book on romance story structure, Romancing the Beat? Since I’m a big fan of Three Act Structure, I found the book to be an excellent resource when it comes to crafting relationships in my own writing.

However, up until now one aspect never quite clicked for me: “Phase 3: Retreating from Love.”

If you’ve ever had more than one beta reader reviewing your manuscript at a time, you’ve probably amassed a fair amount of feedback in chapter notes, line-by-line comments, questionnaires, and/or written summaries.

Compiling all this feedback into an organized document that actually helps you tackle story revisions can be challenging. Fortunately, there are a few ways you can make the process easier on yourself.

For anyone who has looked for beta readers on forums or social media, you may know that people are eager to sign up, but not everyone follows through. Today I’ll describe one way you can better engage with beta readers early: having them fill out a brief signup questionnaire.

I suck at writing query letters.

In fact, I’m so awful at making a story sound enticing, I’ve given up explaining the premise of new movies to my boyfriend. When I do, he inevitably has no interest in seeing them.

This September I spent upwards of thirty hours writing and rewriting (and rewriting) the 200 words that comprise my query letter’s pitch. Thankfully I had some patient feedback from beta readers and other writers on the internet. Otherwise, I’d still be sitting on a supremely dry and boring excuse of a query for These Fleeting Flames.

Today I’m going to share a few hard-won tips that helped me write a half-decent query letter.