Monday, November 24, 2008

Query Letters

Oh, the dreaded query letter. Even after slaving away for months or years on a book, writing, editing - you’re still not finished. Now you have to write a query letter to send to an agent or editor. And everyone tells you (‘cause everyone knows) the query has to be perfect. You should spend weeks massaging the words, writing and re-writing until it’s perfect. If it’s not, the agent will trash it after scanning the fist sentence. One mis-spelling, one misplace comma, or, heaven-forbid, stating your credentials before giving the word count (!!!) and zip your letter is shredded, stamps steamed off the SASE and added to the agent’s growing pile of stamp-booty, and your name branded onto the Unacceptable list.

Let’s get down to reality. There’s really no reason in this day and age of computers with spell and grammar check to have mis-spellings and undecipherable grammar. And you should spend some time working on that query letter. You can also make it easier by following a set layout in your query letters. One I teach in my workshop is: Look, Hook, Book, Cook. You can come up with your own way of writing a query. Knowing what you want to include in the letter makes it easier to write the letter.

But let’s not go into hyperventilation at the thought of having to write one. And let’s not spend as long crafting the letter as we did writing the book.

Stephen Barbara has written an article in Publishers Weekly about how’s he’s rather tired of all the perfect query letters crossing his desk. Read it. It might make you feel better.

12 comments:

  1. Thanks for sharing that commentary. It's refreshing to know that some agents are simply looking for a great, well-written story.

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  2. "I find myself receiving well-written, correctly formatted, professional-looking query letters from bad writers."

    Beautiful. Great article, and encouraging to know that an agent is actually more interested in how well an author can write than in how well he or she has studied up on crafting a professional looking query letter.

    Also a witty and funny post, Helen. Loved it.

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  3. If you write in a genre Stephen Barbara likes to represent, he seems like an agent you'd want to put on your "to be queried" list.

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  4. Marvin, it IS interesting, isn't it. After all the admonitions and warnings that the first sentence of your query can kill your career, it's nice to hear a sane voice.

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  5. Good advice, Helen. There are a number of books out there that take you by the hand and lead you through the process of writing the "perfect" query letter, but I suspect that it's all relative, anyway. A perfect query to one editor or agent is no doubt just another paper to scan and trash to another. It's mainly a matter of luck.

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  6. I had worked and reworked and reworked my query - I never liked it and the few agents I queried with it seemed to feel the same way that I did.

    I'd pretty much given up on this book, figured it was going to be yet another tome for the metaphoric drawer. Sat down late at night on July 4th and decided to give it once last shot and rework it to send to an agent that a writing buddy thought might be a good fit for me. I had a couple glasses of wine, approached the query with a "WTF" attitude, finished it, emailed it to the agent and went to bed.

    The next AM I had a request for a partial, and after quite a bit of work on the MS (very productive work I would add), the agent took me on.

    I don't know if I would recommend this approach to query-writing to everyone, but it did work for me!

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  7. I wouldn't submit to this guy. I want an agent who actually plays the drinking game. My work looks pretty good, almost literary, to someone who's sh*t-faced.

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  8. Jean, it is a lot of luck. Work, too, though. You have to get the basics in the letter - paragraph synopsis, word count, genre, a bit about you, the author, etc. I think the one thing that will make your letter stand out is to put you in the letter and to make the voice of the letter fit with the voice of the book.

    I'm also thinking, Lisa and Mark, that this is what you do. If your books are not tight, buttoned-down, tales, then why should your query letter be that?

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  9. In all seriousness, the "WTF" attitude with which I approached the query really did capture the voice of the novel much better than my more buttoned-down earlier versions. I think that "voice" is the underestimated X factor that attracts agents (and I hope, publishers). I think it was Jessica Faust who wrote recently that she signed writers for their voice, not for a single book. That was kind of nice to hear, because I know it often takes more than one book making the rounds to get that initial deal, no matter how good your agent is.

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  10. I've met Jessica Faust and like her. Don't know her personally, but have met from my days as Executive Director at the Writers' League of Texas.

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  11. There's a free e-book by Noah Lukeman available on the query letter.

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  12. Thank you Todd.

    If anyone is interested in Noah's free book, you can check it out at:
    http://www.amazon.com/How-Write-Great-Query-Letter/dp/B00122GU86

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