How to Query Provender Press (It’s a Mad Lib)

Founder and Publisher Angela Grace Morgan shares her thoughts about publishing on Substack. Here’s an excerpt from her latest post.

Provender Press will be accepting queries for the 2027-2028 publishing season starting June 1, 2026.

Query letters are stressful. They don’t have to be.

Here’s the thing: I’m not looking for a perfectly crafted pitch. I’m looking for a person I might want to work with for the next several years. A query letter that sounds like something from a “how to query” website doesn’t tell me much about that. A query letter that sounds like you tells me a lot.

Plus, I hate to make people guess about what I want. It seems mean.

So, here’s what I actually want. Fill it in and send it over. Examples and where to send are after the Mad Lib. :-)

The Mad Lib Part

• I am _______________.
  (Who you are. Not your resume, you. A sentence or two.)

• I am writing / have written _______________.
  (Format, genre, title.)

• It is _______________.
  (Word count, target market or age range.)1

• It’s about _______________.
  (Broad brush strokes. Like you’d read in a catalog or TV guide. One paragraph. ONE. The goal here is for me to if your project is in a lane I can work with. If it is, I’ll ask for more. If it isn’t, more detail won’t help.)2

• It’s similar to _______________(comparable titles)but different because _______________(what’s unique about it).
  OR
  It’s a mix of _______ and _______.
  (Please make your comparable titles well-known and relatively recent unless they are iconic classics. Being obscure here doesn’t help, it just makes it harder for me to get my head around your project.)

Many thanks to Wesley Tingey and Unsplash for providing the photo.