Whatever they're like, these are your readers. If you thought you were writing edgy urban fiction for hipsters but the readers who liked it most were all fifty-something suburbanites, you'll need to be honest with yourself about your potential audience. Your honesty will help you narrow your search for agent, editor, publisher—whoever will help your book find its way into the hands of your future readers. Whoever your readers are, it's exciting to realize that there could be more of them out there. Your job is to find a way to reach them. There's a lot to do before you or they hold a bound copy of your book, but the first step in reaching them is to write a query letter to a literary agent.
WRITING THE LETTER
YOU'RE NOT GOING TO SEND_
Have you ever written a letter you knew you wouldn't send? That's the kind of letter your first query letter is going to be. You're going to write it, but you're not going to send it out to agents or editors. Why not?
Because you're going to use this letter to (1) make a better letter, and (2) make a better book. A query letter, like the best writing, has urgency and clarity. It's not dull, but it attends to the business at hand without fuss. It is, of course, a sales pitch directed with passion, belief, enthusiasm, or urgency at someone likely to buy the product being pitched. You' re trying to find a reader for your book. And because every editor and agent is first a reader, you're going to write this letter to the reader who is most likely to want to read your book.
Figuring out who that is isn't as hard as it sounds, but it does mean you're going to drop the idea you had of doing a mail merge to every agent in annual directories like Literary Market Place or Guide to Literary Agents. (We'll
discuss the ins and outs of coming up with a list of potential agents in chapter f ifteen.) For the purposes of this letter you're not going to send, however, ihink about the reader you've identified as your ideal audience. He can he someone you know, someone who's read your manuscript, or someone you've made up. He can even be you. It doesn't matter. But you're going to write this letter with one person—that person—in mind, because you want your letter to sound focused, personable, and natural, not generic, vague, and stilted.
CLEARING YOUR THROAT
How to start your letter—by describing yourself or your book? Since most people can't decide, they try to make it easy on themselves by stating the obvious. This is the written equivalent of clearing your throat. Here are some opening lines from some real query letters I've received:
I am writing to ask your agency to represent my unpublished novel.
There was no need for this writer to tell me that his novel was unpublished. Agents assume that people are writing to them about unpublished novels unless they are told otherwise, i.e., that it's a novel that was self-published or one that was published years ago and has gone out of print. Here are some other ways of stating the obvious:
I was flattered when I read that last sentence. But after thinking it over, I got anxious because the writer didn't state what my agency had a reputation for. It really could have been anything.
Some writers try to open their letters with something profound to hook the reader, but because doing so is just another way of stating the obvious, it backfires:
There is little joy to be found in a life steeped in depression. Here's another favorite in the philosophical hook genre:
A life can be defined by a single decision. Taking one path when you're young, and not another, can make all the difference in later life.
When I read that, I was grateful that the writer had thoughtfully explained in the second sentence exactly what he meant in the first.
These inept or at the very least ineffective opening sentences unwittingly tell me a lot, and in this way at least they're economical: I don't need to read the manuscript at all to reject it. To tell you the truth, I don't even need to read the whole letter. These opening lines tell me that the writer is prone to redundancy, which over the course of a full-length book is going to be very tedious indeed. They tell me the writer is somewhat timid, which makes me doubt that the prose will have the muscularity, urgency, or just plain confidence to achieve liftoff. They tell me that the writer doesn't have the kind of writing voice that makes the reader feel he is being spoken to personally. They tell me that the writer is given to half-baked generalities or is simply too lazy to wrestle his prose into something hard and bright and sharp as a diamond, with all a diamond's qualities of beauty, fire, depth, and the ability to cut glass.
EMPTY WORDS = NO HOOK: WHAT NOT TO DO
Don't follow the example of the following writers, whose letters were chosen randomly from the weekly haul, and who wasted their one-liners by using:
GENERALITIES AND CLICHES
• It's a book of literary fiction that focuses on a nasty tragedy, a novel of wry humor and tragic love.
• My first novel relates to specific ecological themes.
• It is a coming-of-age novel for women who come of age late in life.
• Fiercely independent [heroine] embarks on an identity journey, discovering love as humankind's greatest strength and its greatest weakness.
WORD COUNTS AND FORMAT
• Novel, mystery, suspense, 367 pages, double-spaced, finished.
• My novel is a 105,000-word descriptive, spiritual narrative formed on the memories of my own conversation, events, and experiences of the last few years.
LOCALE AND ERA
• The story is set in the 1970s and is about a rural Texas girl striving to escape her violent husband.
• It is a composition of commercial fiction set in both urban and rural locations, assembled in 340 pages in 26 chapters.
SHOPPING LISTS OF GENRES OR CHARACTER TYPES
• [Title] is a dark fiction/horror with elements of psychology, romance, mystery/thriller, dark-comedy, erotica, and fantasy.
• When an emerging New York artist disappears a few days before his exhibition opens he starts a chain of events that brings together crooked gallery owners, wannabe artists, professional forgers, ex-con smugglers, ecstasy drug dealers, and the FBI.
OVERCONFIDENCE
• Those that read the novel compare it to Kurt Vonnegut's.
• Consider a thriller with the flawed protagonist and satiric humor of a DeMille novel who finds himself in the middle of a catastrophe of Clancy proportions.
• My own style might be described as a dreamlike amalgamation of Nabokov, Wodehouse, Miller, Breon, Bulgakov, and Rabelais.
• Novelist Zoe Heller wrote Notes on a Scandal; my book is every bit as good.
• I've just completed my first novel, which I think you will find as compelling as anything by Doris Lessing or Philip Roth.
WASTES OF TIME
• I have hundreds of pages of plot structure, characterization, and time line on a trilogy I've always wanted to write.
• Though my story has existed mostly in my private journals, late night chainsmoking conversations among friends, and papers written in grad school, it is begging me to give it a broader voice.
BAFFLING
• What I am presently sending you started out many years ago as the beginning of a sprawling manuscript. I have been working on it for over ten years. I am in the process of dividing my enormous manuscript into sequential novels. ...
• I, a psychiatrist, have written a novel ...
• Wanted: An Agent who can represent Literary Fiction manuscripts that are somewhat large.
No one's inherently opposed to (a) novels that take ten years to write, (b) psychiatrists who write fiction, or (c) manuscripts that are "somewhat large." But non of these qualities are primary sales hooks. If they were, then generic novels—like generic ketchup, or paper towels, or salt—would have taken off years ago. Cover: black type on white background. Titles: Novel That Took Ten Years to Write, Novel By Psychiatrist, and Novel That Is Somewhat Large.
These letters are big on blather but describe books that are entirely free of distinguishing features. The authors of
the books suspect this without admitting it to themselves—that's why they pad their letters with empty information and meaningless phrases.
TOP 10 QUERY LETTER NO-NOS:
10. Letters that have typos in the first sentence.
9. Letters that start with a nugget of wisdom: "Every step we take in life moves us in a direction."
8. Letters with faint or very small type. You can assume that just about everyone in publishing suffers from eyestrain.
7. Letters longer than one page.
6. Letters with overcomplicated directions for replying: "I'm going to Tortolla for the next three weeks. If you need to reach me, please call my cell number. Don't leave a message at my home number because I won't get it until I return." A simple street or e-mail address will do.
5. Photocopied letters with no salutation.
4. Letters that start, "I know how busy you are, so I'll get straight to the point and not take up too much of your valuable time." By writing this, you've already taken up a full sentence of my valuable time.
3. Letters that make grandiose claims: "My novel will appeal to women, and since there are 150 million women in the United States, it will sell 150 million copies."
2. Letters that say: "I've worked very hard on this novel." Does that fact alone make it a good novel?
1. And the number one query letter no-no: "I have written a fiction novel."
When an agent sees the above sentence in a query letter, he quickly draws the conclusion that a writer who doesn't know that a novel is, by definition, a work of fiction is a writer who isn't ready to be published.
BUILDING A QUERY LETTER
THAT WORKS_
By inference and bad examples, you've figured out that a good query letter:
• doesn't state the obvious—if it does, agents will think your book is all "telling," no "showing"
• is never longer than one page—if it is, agents will think your book is overwritten
• is not about you—if it is, agents will think your book will be too navel-gazing to invite the reader in
• never sounds generic—if it does, agents will think your book won't have a unique or appealing voice
• makes the book sound interesting—if it doesn't, agents will know the book isn't
Here's a letter that got my attention: Dear Ms. Rittenberg,
I am seeking representation. I have won a few awards for fiction and poetry. My novel, THE CLEARING [later tided A Certain Slant of Light], is a supernatural love story told from the point of view of a young woman who has been dead 130 years. She's haunting a high school English teacher when one of the boys in his class sees her. No one has seen her since her death. When the two of them fall in love, the fact that he is in a body and she is not presents the first of their problems.
Please let me know if you would be interested in reading part or all of THE CLEARING. I have enclosed a SASE. Thank you and I look forward to hearing from you.
Although Laura (yes, that's Laura Whitcomb, co-author of this book) began the letter by saying something that might not have been strictly necessary, she said it with admirable brevity. I didn't have time to stop in the middle of the opening sentence. Before I knew it, I had read the whole letter and written the word yes at the bottom. (If you could see the pile of rejected query letters in my office every week, you would see how the no is always written at the top of the letters. That's because I didn't reach the end.) Laura's letter wasn't written with fireworks, but it didn't need to be because the story as she described it briefly needed no embellishment. And she had enough confidence in her story to let the description be.
SET YOUR HOOK
The first paragraph of your query letter should skip the throat-clearing or at least keep the opening pleasantries to a bare minimum and get quickly to the one-line description. In that sentence you'll give the title of the novel and insert the genre if appropriate. Here's the first line of a letter I saw this year:
[Title]| is a coming-of-age novel about two young women trying to survive their first year of college and find their own identities.
To tell you the truth, that sentence would have been enough to describe the book, but the author went on for four more sentences in an attempt to make the novel sound dramatic. If she had taken out those four addi-tional sentences, she would have had a serviceable description of the novel. However, she probably also would have had to face the fact that her novel was not inherently dramatic enough to interest agents and editors in a competitive marketplace. It didn't have a hook. Somewhere within herself, she knew this, and that's why she added the four sentences.
Look again at Laura's letter:
My novel, THE CLEARING, is a supernatural love story told from the point of view of a woman who has been dead for 130 years.
The genre, the title, and the hook in one sentence. Laura added a few more sentences to flesh out the basic idea, but she didn't go on too long and, more importantly, she left the reader with a cliffhanger by saying:
When the two of them fall in love, the fact that he is in a body and she is not presents the first of their problems.
Your hook should be your novel's distinguishing feature. A distinguishing feature can be something imaginative in the plot—the way Laura's book was a love story featuring a heroine who'd been dead for 130 years—or it can be sheer good writing. It can be something unique about the book or about the way you describe the book. But if the one-liner doesn't make anyone sit up and take notice, all the additional plot description in the world isn't going to help.
Your letter should not describe your book at length, should not drag the reader all the way through the plot and should not give away the ending. A real mood-killer is to use an overworked notion like redemption or a cliched description like It's about the human condition when describing your book. Stick to the concrete. It's easy to see why someone might think that a one-line description is the same thing as a summary, but it's not.
LISTENING TO YOUR LETTER
If you're having trouble boiling the description of your book down to something that's vivid, cogent, and above all brief, it is very possible that your book is not, in fact, ready to be sent out. The letter might be saying, "The problem isn't with me, it's with the book you're trying to describe."
Here are some letters that were desperately trying to tell their authors that something was amiss:
• No single paragraph could sufficiently describe this novel, but I will try.
• Because of the large scope of the book this synopsis is a bit longer than what was asked. I attempted to shorten it, but I could not.
• My novel, the first in a series about a lawyer, is a hell of a ride. The entire novel, 716 pages, is complete and ready to ship.
• [The novel] is told by an unnamed narrator from a tiny shack with bad plumb-ing. In an aphoristic style, he recounts the epic tale of the rise and fall of... a multilevel marketing company. ... Along the way, he takes time to criticize many horrendous but inexplicably popular things that have infiltrated society, making comments that are destined to be quoted at the bottom of e-mails and scrawled on dry-erase boards. ...
Have you tried to describe your novel and found yourself unable to stop? You need to ask yourself why that is. If the answer is "there's no other way to describe it," then your novel is in trouble. This is when you know you can use your query letter to help you make your book better.
MOVING RIGHT ALONG: A LITTLE BIT ABOUT YOU
In your second paragraph, you can give some brief and pertinent biographical information. Writing courses, publications, and awards are good. But more than a sentence summing up minor publications and writing study is not so good. A recent letter stated:
I am a former English teacher who has published many poems in small journals and written book and visual art reviews.
Already too long, this line was followed by two more sentences. Again I had the opportunity to conclude that anyone who couldn't condense his pertinent writing experience i
nto something brisk and interesting was not likely to have written a gripping or deeply absorbing novel. It is permissible to enclose a one-page list or a paragraph on a separate sheet noting all your credentials, publications, or awards, but a long curriculum vitae will probably be ignored.
Remember—the immediate task of the query letter is to get an agent or editor interested in reading your novel. It's not to showcase what an interesting, fabulous, credentialed, or kooky person you are. That will come later, when your agent needs to sell you as well as your book; we'll discuss this in chapter eighteen. But for now, you need to come across as professional, serious, dedicated, and confident. Too jokey a tone is wrong. Even if the letter is truly wry or funny or amusingly self-deprecating, it distracts us from the point: Have you written a book I want to read?
Anything you say about yourself should somehow, briefly and brilliantly, make us think we want to read your book. All Laura said of herself was: "I have won a few awards for fiction and poetry." Because she couldn't claim to have won the Pulitzer, hadn't invented nuclear fusion, wasn't married to someone famous and, more to the point, had never published a book, there was no point in giving a long resume of her achievements.
Many query writers insert a sentence beginning, "Although I am an unpublished writer..." Doing so simultaneously states the obvious (you're writing about your first novel, after all) and dwells negatively on you—on what you haven't done. Remember that the query letter is looking to the future. The future is when someone is going to read your novel, and your job is to convince us that we will be that future someone. Say no more than one or two things:
• I received my M.F.A. from the Columbia Writing Program, where my novel was awarded the Prize for Singular Fabulousness.
• I've worked as a taxi driver and a mail carrier while writing and publishing short fiction in literary journals.
DON'T WEAR OUT YOUR WELCOME: THE CLOSING
Your third paragraph should be the sign-off paragraph. Wrap up the letter with a word or two about having enclosed a SASE and looking forward to a response, and sign off. Don't drag it out. Don't give your vacation schedule with your spouse's cell phone number. If you've used letterhead with your address, e-mail address, and telephone number, or inserted that information in a business-letter-appropriate fashion, anyone who wants to track you down will find you. Many agents nowadays don't even need you to indicate that you're making a multiple submission, because they assume you are. So stop talking, finish the letter with a complimentary closing, and hit "Save." Then prepare yourself for the next step: researching agents to find the right one for your book.
Your First Novel Page 18