Dear Nicole:
I am submitting my book series, Growing with Pinto, to your agency. Growing with Pinto is a series of 5 interactive children’s stories and parents’ manual. The series is designed to help parents teach important life skills to their children with learning challenges.
Working Titles: Growing With Pinto series includes 5 books for children and a companion parents’ manual:
Home Dog ABC 123 (File Attached)
Dog Days
Be Clean Routine
Litter Bug (manuscript below)
Bull Lee (manuscript below)
Parent’s Manual
Content: The 5 books in the Growing With Pinto series allow children to interact with their parents so that they can learn valuable life skills such as:
- · Spelling their name
- · Remembering and reciting their address and telephone number
- · Remembering and reciting the alphabet
- · Knowing the calendar and remembering special dates
- · Creating good hygiene habits – promotes healthy eating – new food pie
- · Respecting the environment
- · Respecting others
- · Recognizing bullying
I wrote these books from my own family’s experience. I am a single parent of a learning-challenged child. When I could not find resources to assist my son, I created my own. In spite of facing many odds in the educational system my son became an Eagle Scout and recently graduated from high school. My goal is to donate a portion of proceeds from this series to a non-profit literacy organization in order to share the gift of reading. There are many low income families that need resources to teach their learning-challenged children so that they can grow up to be productive members of society.
I am also an Executive Assistant at Comcast Spotlight and volunteer at the National Multiple Sclerosis Society – Western PA Chapter. I was diagnosised with relapsing remitting MS in 1992 and am currently in remission.
Thank you for reading my work. Please feel free to call me on my mobile telephone at (412) 477-1733. I look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
Leslie Moore
Jamie Ayres 
It’s perhaps my own preference, but I’m unsure of addressing agents by their first name. I’d err on the side of caution and always address it with title and last name. As I’m unfamiliar with non-fiction queries as opposed to fiction queries I’m not sure how helpful other commentary would be 🙂 Good luck with this!
I agree. I’m not too familiar with non-fiction queries but it seems comprehensive enough. Either way, you probably don’t want to address anyone by anything other than Ms. or Mr. unless you know them personally. Best of luck! 🙂
I like the proposal, though I have no experience with non-fiction either. Seems very well thought out and concise, and you provide enough background to tell me you have lived this yourself. Has anyone used your methods on other children? Would that be something to mention to an agent? (Again, flying blind here…sorry!)
Nicely done, hope this works out swimmingly for you!
I like how you used your personal experience in this query. I think it works for this type of book. It shows that you’re a go-getter that your wrote these books when you couldn’t find them for your son:) One thing, although I think it’s noble you want to donate some proceeds to charity, I don’t know if the query is the time to mention it. It feels like you’re trying to guilt them into signing you, and I’m sure that’s not how you meant it. Remember, keep the query as short as possible & let the work speak for itself. As a teacher, I’d love to see these books!
I commend you for developing books like this. I think it is a novel approach to children’s literature. Add an s to manual in the first paragraph. I would caution you against attaching anything unless an agent/editor requests it—this could land you in Spam. Also, you might want to consider shopping one project at a time. It is great that you’ve completed five, but I don’t SEE a lot about any one of them in the body of this query. Really delving deeply into the content of one of the books might work in your favor. Great idea with this—and I wish you the best of luck with it.
I’m way to inexperienced to comment on this type of book, but it sounds very interesting and I wish you the best of luck!