THE INVENTION OF GREEK MYTHOLOGY is the book.
Now read the trailer. Or at least the query.
Proper thanks and respect go out to @fairchildhawks, who is a phenomenal editor as well as encourager of writers.
I welcome feedback on this revision of a template that will be personalized to each agent I contact. I’m excited. I hope you’re excited.
Querying should begin quite soon. As in, soon.
Dear __________,
Greek mythology has never been hotter. Teens are making TikToks about Andromeda the Ethiopian princess, Rick Riordan’s PERCY JACKSON empire keeps growing, and BMW recently bet a Super Bowl zillion that Arnold Schwarzenegger as Zeus would sell their new electric car. THE INVENTION OF GREEK MYTHOLOGY, at 80,000 words, offers readers the reason for this evergreen content generator’s staying power: creativity pops when it’s multicultural and diverse.
Taking its cue from books such as Wilkerson’s resonant, revelatory CASTE, but using the familiar content known from compendiums such as Frye’s HEROES, my book argues that Greek myths didn’t drop from the sky like Pandora, pre-made by a few European literary gods. No: It was more like fusion cuisine, a messy, delicious mash-up of multiple cultures, ideas, stories and beliefs that has continued to reinvent itself up to the present day.
My chapters retrace a historical odyssey, starting with Hesiod and Homer, those literary gods who owe so much to their eastern Mediterranean neighbors. The tour moves on to places like Etruria and Rome, where the myths were first reinvented, continues through setbacks (and further transformations) in the Christian era, and ends with the full re-flowering of the tales in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—and their further diversification in the twenty-first.
My training and experience is also a blend helpful to communicating with a wide and diverse audience: I’m a public scholar with a doctorate in classics and a middle school teacher constantly reinventing mythology to get students to care about Latin. My writing credits range from hard scholarship to curriculum to essays and columns that bring the ancient world alive for today’s readers.
Your experience with and interest in representing a diverse mix of academics, journalists and other writers in serious nonfiction will be crucial to the sale of this manuscript. I have included ____________ and would be happy to send a full proposal at your convenience. Thank you for your time and consideration.
Respectfully,
That’s all, folks. Be on the lookout for a Schwarzenegger post. Or even one about that Lunchables commercial with the Trojan Horse. Weird!