Five Unconventional Tips for Better Query Letters (Patreon)

So, you’ve spent hundreds of hours writing and revising your novel and now you want to land a literary agent. Or maybe you’ve met an editor at a convention and they invited you to send a pitch.

A lot of digital ink has been spilled about queries, so for this essay I wanted to mix in some ideas and perspectives I don’t see as often. During my time at Angry Robot, I read hundreds of query letters as part of novel pitches via agents or directly from authors during Open Door periods, pitch contests, etc. I’ve spent plenty of time looking at query letters as the person being pitched as well as having written them to pitch my own work, and hopefully these tips will help make the process easier for you.

1) Write to the person first and the job second

Agents read thousands upon thousands of queries, often dozens at a time. A great way to help make a good first impression is to open with a little bit of genuine personalization. A query is still a business letter, so it’s good to not be overly familiar (especially if you haven’t actually met the agent before). But if you’re querying an agent because a book by a client of theirs kept you up all night, why not say as much? If they’re at the top of your list because of an amazing answer they gave during an interview, say it. 

When I queried this fall in my new agent search, most of the query letters I sent were to agents I already knew from my work at Angry Robot or from the convention circuit. But I still filtered everything through the form of the query – a business letter that addresses the premises of “does this book sound interesting” and “do I want to work with this person?” Having a professional history with the agents let me reference books we’d worked on together or my admiration for how they’d advocated on their author’s behalf, but I also referenced agents’ perspectives on the business or how they talked about career development and did my best to not assume that our relationship as colleagues guaranteed anything in terms of this project or literary representation.

If you don’t have an existing relationship, it’s probably best to be concise and specific in your personalization (concise and specific are good watch words for query letters in general), drawing on publicly-available knowledge from when the agent was acting in that capacity. That could be as simple as “I was struck by the way you talked about worldbuilding for all five senses in your interview on Writer’s Digest and thought you might like what I’ve done with my fantasy novel…” or “Your #MSWL says you’re looking for books that balance adventure and comedy like Thor: Ragnarok, and that’s exactly what I tried to do in my space opera…”

2) The tone of the query should match the tone of your novel

Most of the word-count of a query letter is going to be about the work itself – setting up the world, characters, plot, etc. As much as possible, the tone you use in that description should convey the same tone that your novel deploys. If you’re pitching a breezy adventure story, the query should carry that same sense of excitement, and if you’re pitching a sizzling romance, the query letter should have some of that same heat. 

Because queries are short, it’s essential to keep word choice in mind as you’re fine-tuning your query. If you’re writing an epic fantasy novel, give a sense of scope, of characters thrust into conflict on a grand scale, how their divided loyalties pull ever-harder at the character from multiple directions. Again, try to be specific without taking up too many words. 

) Choose the Form of The Pitch-structor

Query letters are short – you can’t convey the entire novel in 200-250 words – but you can give an evocative view in passing that makes the reader want more. But what view, and how? Picking your angle requires both reflection and some market knowledge. When I read query letters at Angry Robot, I was looking for the thing that made this work distinct – I wanted to know what the *there* there was for the project. What was the hand-hold that gave me a way into the novel and get excited about it? The query letters that worked for me said clearly what the novel was setting out to do – whether it was mixing genre flavors that usually didn’t go together or bringing a new perspective to a familiar premise.

You only have so many words in a query to get your point across, some combination of explaining the characters, the setting, the premise, and the plot. Chances are you can’t do justice to them and that one element should take the spotlight. When I was pitching Genrenauts, my focus in the pitch was the premise – story experts traveling across a multiverse to worlds based on genres to find and fix broken stories. The characters are important, but the setting and plot really follow directly from the premise and are important as ways of exploring the premise through the vehicle of the characters. 
Another example - your novel might have an astonishing setting like the living towers in Fran Wilde’s Bone series (Updraft and sequels), and so for your query you want to spotlight that world. Or maybe you focus on the POV character and highlight the world through the ways it presents challenges to your main character. 

It may be useful to make a (short) list of the most important elements of your work and put them into a numbered list of priority. That gives you another way to structure the body of your query and help with condensing a novel of 70k words or more into a one-page letter. Realistically, it’s going to be hard to cram every single cool character, scene, technology, or set-piece into your query letter, so it’s better to figure out how to craft a compelling lure rather than trying to get across everything at once.

) Foreground what makes your work distinct and appealing

Okay, but how? How do you know what to focus on? This is the part that requires a bit of market research to go with your self-reflection.

Because of how the publishing industry works, agents and editors need to think in terms of comparative titles (aka comps) when working with their colleagues in the industry – a book can’t just be a shining, unique, ineffable piece of art. Writing is an art, publishing is a business. It can be an artful, creative one, but a business, nonetheless. Comps help put a book into context – they set expectations about tone, content, and sales expectations. Writing a book that’s so distinct that no one can think of any comparative titles can pose a problem to your sales prospects. 

People use touchstones and comparisons to understand new things every day, so if your work is so distinct that it’s impossible to describe through comparison – that’s going to be a problem when you’re trying to get a publishing partner. “It’s really special you need to read it” can only go so far, especially if you don’t already have a strong relationship with the person your pitching and/or they have lots of other options to choose from, some of which are being described with more specificity.

Luckily, almost every work of art can be compared to other works if you do it right. Because as writers, we are always carrying and subconsciously expressing our experiences, our cultural context, and the stories we’ve absorbed over the course of our lives.

And you don’t have to compare your novel to an entire work – you can be more specific – your novel has the nuanced optimism of The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison or the fresh take on fantasy tropes like N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth books (The Fifth Season and sequels). Just because there aren’t many near-future sociologically-informed romantic comedy novels being published doesn’t mean that you can’t find some aspect of some book for comparison. If I just comped that imaginary book to Courtney Milan’s Cyclone series, that doesn’t necessarily do what I need it to, but if I say that it features characters strongly informed by their social and economic context like Trade Me, now I’m in the ballpark.

) Make exciting promises…that your novel will keep

I saved the best for last. Perhaps the most important thing about a query letter is that it makes aesthetic promises that your novel must keep. So, you need to be deliberate and clear in what promises your query is making and that you’re setting expectations appropriately based on what is in your actual novel. If you end up foregrounding an element that isn’t really that prominent, and an agent gets excited about that angle, they could be disappointed when they dive into the novel and get something different. An agent/editor/etc. reading your query should know what kind of fun the novel will deliver – the catharsis of characters running an emotional gauntlet and coming out stronger, the joy of seeing people falling in love and helping each other grow, the excitement of a breezy thrill-ride through a series of set-pieces, etc.

If you mess up in setting expectations, you’re likely to lose the reader – just like a book’s cover, title, and sales copy need to set expectations correctly, a query letter sets both aesthetic and business expectations for a potential partner.

But if you set expectations correctly, you’ll do yourself a big favor in framing the agent or editor’s mindset so that they’re primed for the type of awesomeness your writing delivers. There’s a great satisfaction in getting excited about a character, a plot, a setting, or all of the above in a query and seeing it delivered in a novel – that’s what you want to set up in your query for your novel to follow through.

So, that’s five tips about writing query letter with the readers’ interests in mind – I hope this proves useful for all of you in the query trenches and/or trying to expand your understanding of the publishing world.