After writing and querying five books that never caught agents' attention, writing a query letter is paralyzing. The idea that this one page has to sell the manuscript I've been working on for a year is just...a bit much. I found Marisa's services through Twitter, her price for a query assessment was reasonable, but I wanted to know more about it. I emailed her a question, she wrote back a thorough and considerate breakdown of her services, invited me to tinker with the packages if my MS needed special treatment of some kind. When we decided to go ahead, I sent her the query I'd scrounged together, and she asked for two days to work on it. I figured she was taking that time to move sentences around, play with the wording. But then I noticed she was checking out my social media profiles, my website--doing a deep-dive into my online presence to help fill in some of the blindspots I had about my own marketability.

The query I gave her was messy. She trimmed it, rearranged paragraphs, and in a thorough and generous Zoom conversation, while going spot-by-spot over everything she'd changed, she dished valuable information about publishing itself. Two months later, I've had four requests for a full MS after sending out my query to a few agents. No guarantee that they'll take the book, of course, but I know that Marisa's counsel helped put my foot in the door. She knew exactly what to say, and how to say it, so that an agent would be willing to check out the sample pages and let the work speak for itself. Incredibly happy with Marisa's help, and avidly recommend it to anyone who's got a full MS and wants to make sure they can present it in as professional and attractive an introduction as possible.