The Creative Writer's Survival Guide: Advice from an Unrepentant Novelist

The Query Letter

117 The Query Letter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A query letter is your introduction to an agent or an editor at a publishing house. If it’s for an editor, it’s most likely for an editor at a small or university press since large publishing houses don’t accept unsolicited queries, but even some of these publishers (usually the more competitive and prestigious small presses) are difficult to reach without an agent. Typically, if you’re a fiction writer, you write query letters when you have a completed book that’s ready to be shopped around. (Many nonfiction projects are sold on the basis of a proposal, in which case the purpose of your query letter is to ask an agent or editor if she’s interested in reading your proposal.) More often than not, the query letter to the agent is for a novel. Most agents aren’t interested in short story collections, unless the collection fits into one of these three categories: 1. The short stories are linked and can be marketed as a “novel-​ in-​ stories” or, simply, “fiction” (as was the case with Melissa Banks’ The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing). 2. You’re a regular contributor to the New Yorker and have had your work reprinted in Best American Short Stories, which means you’re what New York publishers are always looking for—The Next Hot Thing. 3. The collection has some irresistible hook, such as “short stories about Palestinian refugees,” and you are a Palestinian whose parents were once refugees. Your short story collection then has a hook for the marketing department that makes the book more appealing than, say, a collection of stories featuring disparate guys who live in Utah, Florida, and Vermont. Your personal connection to the subject may lend itself more easily to media, such as radio and TV interviews. The political angle may get you booked on shows that don’t normally interview fiction writers. Also, the book may have more of an international appeal, which means that it would be easier to sell foreign rights for such a book. Most query letters are written in three parts: the introduction (“I’m writing with the hope that you would be interested in my 118 Getting Published novel, Deep in the Woods of Summer”); the pitch; and a mini-​ bio that highlights your writing and/or educational credits, or any credits that would be applicable to the book (e.g., a former astronaut writing a novel titled The Last Good Man on the Moon). Parts one and three of the query letter are pretty straightforward, but how do you pitch your novel? Write the main body of the query letter so that it reads like a condensed version of your novel’s jacket flap copy. (“Jacket flap copy” is the description of the novel that appears on the inside flap of a hardcover book.) Don’t call yourself a genius or the novel you’vewritten scintillating, as a jacket flap might, but do work on capturing the gist of the book, the character arcs, and the tone, all in a hundred or so words. This is easier said than done. There’s a unique skill required to write good jacket copy, and it’s not necessarily the same skill that is required to be a good fiction writer. Nonetheless, read several dozen dust jackets to get a feel for how they’re structured. The more you read, the better you’ll be able to discern a pattern to them, or a formula , and the better your odds will become of being able to knock out a good one when you sit down to write your query letter. One reason a well-​ written query letter using dust jacket copy language is appealing is because you’re doing everyone’s job for them. The agent can use your query to pitch the novel to editors; an editor who wants to make an offer on the novel can pitch it to the editorial board using your query; the folks in marketing, who may have a voice in whether the book gets published, can see exactly how the book should be pitched; and, finally, if the book gets picked up by a publisher, passages from your query letter can be pilfered for catalogs , for sales meetings, and for the book itself. It’s not at all uncommon for my final jacket flap copy to have been pieced together from my initial query letter. Bear in mind that...