How To Write A Query Letter

After years of toiling away, you’ve written the next great American novel.

You’re ready to adorn the pages of every website and stock the shelves of every bookstore across the country. All you have to do is convince a publishing house your work is worthy.

One problem: publishing houses typically don’t deal directly with authors. They rely on literary agents who know the industry and what sells to filter out the less desirable stories.

And that means you need a literary agent.

Which means you need a query package.

What exactly is a query package? The query package is your pitch to a literary agent to convince them to represent your work.

Query Package Elements

Honestly, the query package and querying process aren’t that different from the steps you go through when deciding on which book to read next. After all, your time is limited and there are lots of books in the sea. Therefore, the book itself needs to convince you that its worthy of your time. It needs to sell itself to you.

And that’s the job of the query package.

A query package is your submission to an agent that attempts to convince them that your work is worthy of their time.

It typically consists of three elements:

• The query letter

• A synopsis

• A writing sample

Let’s go through each of these elements...

Query Letter:

You’re in the book store looking for the next novel to keep you up too late at night. What convinces you to give that book a chance? Likely, you start with the genre. Do you want horror or romance? Then you might read the blurb on the back. Does it hook you? If so, maybe check out the page count. A 300-page novel seems right for your upcoming beach trip but that 2,000-page books seems a bit much.

At this point, you either sigh and put the book back on the shelf or head for the checkout counter.

Your query letter isn’t much different. It introduces your story, hooks the agent, and convinces them they could successfully sell your work to a publisher. The letter is often only 250-500 words and should excite the agent about the chance to represent your novel.

The query letter should include the following:

General Info About Your Work: the basics on your story, such as its title, word count, and genre, similar to the most basic filters you use to begin your own book-selecting process. Does the title sound interesting? Does the agent represent that genre? Is it too long or too short? The agent wants to know these things right away.

Hook: your reason for contacting a particular agent and why you think they’d be a good fit to represent your work.

Blurb: a short description of the novel. This is your version of the back cover: a brief synopsis dripping with hooks to pique an agent’s interest. Make it un-put-downable.

Comparable Titles: agents want to know how you envision your novel being marketed and one way to represent that information is by comparing your story to others on the market. The back of that book you just picked up claims to be “The next Harry Potter…” for a reason: to give you a sense of where it fits into the overall market. Similarly, your comp titles should be two-to-three books - ideally published within the last several years - that bear some similarity to your work, whether in genre, tone, theme, etc..

Biography: just as each book contains a brief bio on the author, so your query letter should contain a bit about you, your writing history (if any), and any reason why you might be uniquely qualified to write your story. If your work is about about a young doctor performing never-before-seen miracle surgeries and you happen to actually be a doctor, mention so here. If you have no writing history, don’t sweat it. Just tell the agent who you are and why you wrote the story.

Synopsis:

Writing the synopsis is perhaps the most difficult part of the query package. Here, you’re asked to summarize your entire 80,000-word novel within an excruciatingly small 500-800 words. Sounds difficult? It certainly can be.

The synopsis is your entire story in a nutshell. It includes the main characters, the stakes, the major plot points, and, yes, the resolution - everything an agent needs to understand your story and entice them into asking to see a full manuscript.

Writing Sample:

Back in the book store, you’ve picked up a novel and like what you’re seeing on the front and back covers. It’s the right genre and length. The title grabs your attention. What do you do next? You open it up and give it a test drive. You read the first page or two.

Similarly, an agent wants to see if your work passes this final initial test.

The writing sample, then, is a small taste of the work itself. Agents will often ask to see a specific number of pages, words, or chapters they need in order to determine how good you are at your chosen craft of writing and whether the work lives up to the promise of the synopsis.

So, make sure your novel is complete and your first chapter is the best it can be.

How To Submit Your Query Package

With these elements in place and your query letter ready to go, all you have to do is submit it.

Naturally, that’s not as easy as it sounds.

You see, not every agent wants the same query package.

One agent may want the query letter, synopsis, and a writing sample. Another may not want a synopsis at all. And if they require a writing sample, the format of that varies as well. The first agent may want the first 10,000 words. The next agent may want the first three chapters. The third may want the first ten pages.

You’ll need to go to review each agent’s requirements before submitting. Yes, that’s a lot of research.

And then, you have to submit it. Here, too, agent requirements can vary. Do they want you to submit via email? Using QueryManager? Or do they have their own custom form?

Yes, that’s a lot of copying/pasting into forms or email editors.

And you still have to track each submission!

Sigh.
It’s a long, exhausting process.

Querying is not for the faint of heart.

Querier Can Help!

The above can feel pretty overwhelming. But fear not! Querier is here to help.

While Querier can’t write the query package for you, it can simplify the process.

Querier can help you find the agents who will best respond to your work and generate a submission package for you based on an agent’s specific requirements.

One agent wants a query letter, synopsis, and the first 10 pages, while another wants a query letter, no synopsis, and the first 8,000 words? No problem. Querier will create these very different packages with the click of a button, and make submitting a snap, whether via email, QueryManager, or a custom form.

Best of all – you can try Querier for free!