The query letter
Hi everyone,
I’m still researching agents so I’ll talk a bit about query letters until I get back to writing.
A query letter has eight elements:
1. Name of your book
2. Genre
3. Word count
4. Opening hook
5. Description of your book
6. Comparative titles
7. Short author bio
8. Why you are submitting to this agent in particular.
You can put them in any order you want but you should include all of them
You can either introduce your book first, or you the author, or why you are querying this agent. You’ll get advice for beginning with all three.
Which ones you open with will depend on your writing style and your project and why you are querying this agent and who you are.
You want to begin with what you feel is the strongest?
Is it your hook?
or your author credentials?
Or have you been referred by someone else?
Query letters are hard to do, so I suggest starting before you finish your novel. That way you can revise and refine it over a long period of time. It’s helpful to the novel, too, if you know what the core of your book is before you finish revising it.
I started my query letter during the first draft of Destructive Magic and even though that first query doesn’t look anything like my final query (the plot changed in between), I was refining my querying skills and narrowing down onto the essence, the heart, of my story.
So what do you need?
Elevator Pitch:
First you need one sentence that sums your entire novel up. Your elevator pitch. It doesn’t have to be fancy. Not yet.
Knowing your elevator pitch while writing the book is very useful, and definitely necessary before you query. One of the questions on QueryTracker requests a one sentence pitch of your novel.
Two body paragraphs about your story:
You don’t have to get your entire book across in the query letter. That’s what the synopsis is for, and even then, you won’t be able to get it all across, only the most important elements.
In the query you should cover who your main character is—the person the reader will be invested in—the world she lives in, the thing that shakes up that world and turns it upside down (inciting incident) and a couple of plot points from the fun and games section (*see Save the Cat beat sheet below).
The fun and games section is basically the first half of your novel where you fulfil the promise of your story to the reader. If your story is set in a magic school, then there should be lots of magic related things happening. If it’s a mystery, there should be clues.
You don’t need to go past the middle point of your book in the query but as you end your paragraphs (2 max), you should hint at the conflict to come and their emotional journey.
Don’t go overboard trying to squeeze in everything about your story in the query. You can’t. In this case, less is more. You’re just trying to give the agent a taste of your book, to let them know what kind of elements they should expect if they request more. Something that will make them want to read more.
Comparative titles:
You need to include 2-3 book titles from the last 5 years (some say 3 years), that have similar elements to your book. These won’t be replicas of your book but again, you are trying to let the agent know the type of book you’ve written. It’s really just an extension of the paragraph about your story.
If your book is about friendship and has the same tone as another book, include it here so that agent can go, ah yes, I know what kind of book this is.
These titles are not easy to find, so I suggest looking around for them now.
Author paragraph:
The author paragraph depends on what writing credential you have. If you’ve none, it will only be a line or two, if you have more, and it’s a selling point for you, then it will be longer.
Word Count:
Your word count depends on you genre and age group of your target audience (middle grade, young adult, adult). Look it up and try to stick within the ranges given.
If your word count is way above the recommended range, you’ll look like you can’t edit and the agent will have to do a lot of work on it before they can approach a publisher.
Why this agent:
This is important. Don’t query agents randomly—you’ll get a lot of rejections that way. Research them and find agents you think will like your book.
Why do you think your book would fit their list? What about them or the books they’ve sold caught your attention enough for you to query them? Include this reason in your query.
Of course, all of this is irrelevant if you’re self-publishing. If you are, good luck. I don’t know anything about it. Sorry.
Anyway, that’s all from me tonight.
Talk to you tomorrow.
Happy writing,
Joanne.
*https://savethecat.com/beat-sheets
