November Experiment: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Write a Decent Query Letter (Patreon)

(posted to all patrons as a thank you for sticking with me through Patreon's fee restructuring, which affects $1 and $5 donors most)

Happy winter, my dearest Laboratory. Today was our first snow here in Maine, which gloriously murdered all the horrible winter moths that show up twice a year here in New England, covering everything in a terrifying, yet dumb-as-mud moth-curtain and mocking our cozy mammalian lives as they try to become one with anything that might possibly be a light. December be praised! The Laboratory does not like bugs, and certain of us have been known to emit supersonic noises and shed all dignity at the sight of such things. 

Some of you may also have heard that in this snowy month, my Lab Partner proposed in rather grand style, which means I shall soon have an Honest Mad Scientist made of me. This, naturally, put me in the minds of queries.

Specifically, query letters.

Now, kids, when you’ve been at this gig as long as I have, it’s easy to forget how VITAL and PORTENTOUS and FILLED WITH FOUL MAGICS query letters seem in the beginning. There are entire books devoted to telling you how to write a good one, along with seminars and masterclass lectures and panels at conventions. It can be exhausting. It can be confusing. It can seem like a “good” query letter, however good is defined, is some kind of fiery, black-horned, whip-wielding Balrog standing between you and your dreams belching out something about semi-colons and what counts as a credit before just giving up and shrieking YOU SHALL NOT PASS before dumping you off the Bridge of Career-Doom and into the infinite void.

The good news is that, should you achieve entry into the Lothlorien of the Publishing World (a weird place full of seemingly-immortal, vaguely creepy, unimaginably powerful people who can grant or withhold gifts according to little more than whim while insisting you brought your own peril even though you just got here and there’s literally no one else around but them acting shifty), query letters are only scary for a little while. Once you’ve made a name for yourself, either your agent queries for you, or you get very comfortable with dashing off an email that says hey what up I’m Author Q. Neatstuff here’s some Neatstuff that people liked, here’s what I’m after, if you want to know more clock the website under my signature, pleasantries, sincerely, etc, peace out. 

I’ve gotten so used to the whole process that when a friend of mine asked me how to write a “good” query letter, my first reaction was ugh oh god gross query letters the worst kill it with fire and my second was I don’t know, you just write a good query letter ha ha I am out of wine.

Neither of those is overly helpful. So I am going to tell you how to write a query letter and then we are all going to have some wine and probably a nap because this part of publishing is the so-so-so boring but necessary and also just not nearly as big a deal as you think it is when you have delved too deep in the Mines of Slushpilia. This is part of the minutia, along with copyediting, that isn't sexy, but has to become second nature. I should know, not only am I (the President, I’m also a client) an author who has had to write a billion of these dumb things, I also used to edit Apex Magazine, and even got a Hugo nomination for doing it, and you have no idea the EXTRA that is a “dark” SFF or horror magazine slush pile over and beyond the usual, so I’ve looked at life from both sides now and they’re both tear-inducingly tedious, although occasionally hilarious, BUT HEY LET’S GET INTO IT.

NUMBER ONE, LISTEN CLOSELY OH YE FOLK OF THE WILD(E). 

There is no magic combination of words that you can put into a query letter that will speak mellon and enter (oh my god when will she stop torturing Lord of the Rings/publishing metaphors I mean seriously HA HA NEVER I LOVE A TORTURED METAPHOR LIKE MY OWN CHILD) and automatically make an agent or editor love you and devote their lives henceforth to helping you and tip them off to the fact that you are obviously the most brilliant and talented writer of all time who deserves all the advances and awards and if they read but one shimmering sentence of your magnum opus their hearts would turn into butterflies and global warming would be reversed and all the grateful polar bears would come to every reading. 

Doesn’t exist. No one has ever written such a thing and no one ever will. That is not what “good” means. Have you ever written an inter-office memo asking about the agenda for Thursday’s meeting and had the CEO break your door down and offer you his or her job because it was a heartbreaking memo of staggering genius? No? Well, then. 

What is a good query letter?

It’s a query letter that doesn’t annoy the crap out of the recipient.

That’s literally the only step. Don’t be obnoxious. Don’t give the person you’re writing to any excuse to forward your letter to anyone else for giggles, shock value, or to lessen misery by sharing it, or inspire them to perform a dramatic reading of it at a con room party (oh yes, it’s happened. At least once because I did it.) or otherwise, honestly, remember it. You want them to remember your book, not the aching beauty of your query letter. No one gives a rat’s postmodern posterior. The function of a query letter is twofold:

One: so that the recipient has some idea of who and what they’re about to look at.

Two: to give the recipient a reason to toss the manuscript unread and thereby save time because they’re likely reading dozens of people’s work every day.

You have one job. Don’t give them a reason.

It may sound mean, but it isn’t. People do WANT to find the next great thing. That’s their one job. But editors and agents, if they are any good AT ALL, are inundated with manuscripts. It’s incredibly difficult to get through everything, even if you have assistants or slush readers. If you give them a reason to think there’s nothing worthwhile in that attachment, they will be relieved, and they will move on to the next submission. And this is why everyone gets all wound up about query letters, because somewhere deep down you know it’s your first impression and if you fuck it up, you’re going in the bin with Gandalf. 

Fortunately, IT IS RIDICULOUSLY EASY NOT TO FUCK IT UP. That’s why we feel comfortably tossing one that is a mess! Because it’s so easy not to be the worst that if you can’t manage it in a query letter, your book is probably gonna be a real treat. So let’s go over the reasons to Throw an Email Into the Fires of Mount Doom with Extreme Prejudice.

Note: every example of What Not to Do is from a REAL GODDAMNED LETTER OR MANUSCRIPT I have either seen or received, but mostly received. If you think I am kidding, I am not. This isn’t some kind of game. I had to suffer for this knowledge. Now you can, too. 

They fall into three categories: Don’t Be an Idiot, Don’t Be a Douchebag, and Don’t Be a Wallflower.

Don’t Be an Idiot: oh my sweet baby lord use correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation, it’s not that hard, you want to be a writer, not the President. The grammatical rules that govern a five-sentence email are so much less complicated than the ones that govern a full-length novel that if you can’t get it right up top, chances are, you copied and pasted lyrics from a Panic! At the Disco song somewhere in there to pad out your wordcount or consistently forgot to verb for entire chapters or referred to the wife of the heir to the British Throne as the “Duchess of Whales.” (Pro tip: she’s not a duchess. Or, you know, a cetacean. Yes, that’s real, they’re all real, oh god, the humanity.)

Do not misspell the name of the person you are writing to. Do not misgender the person you are writing to. Do not misspell your own name or any of the words in the name of your book. Do not misspell anything. Do not copy/paste your query letter so many times to so many people that you forget to replace Agent A with Agent B in the greeting and look a fool. Do not pop a wheelie with semi-colons or em dashes or languages other than English unless you are querying someone in a language other than English to show off what you can do because you probably can’t do it as well as you think if that’s your idea of lexigraphical peacocking. Do not use all caps. Do not use omg or lol or wtf even if you’re writing a YA novel about people who can only communicate through acronyms. Don’t forget to attach a manuscript. Don’t attach a manuscript and forget to include anything in the body or subject line of the email. Do not submit to publications that have nothing to do with your work, you are wasting their time. If it’s a dark fantasy magazine, don’t submit a story about the happiest puppy in space. If it’s a literary agent specializing in realism, don’t submit your seven volume epic fantasy about zombie dryads.

Do not change the default font in your email program to magenta Papyrus. Do not submit a manuscript in magenta Papyrus. Both magenta and Papyrus are right out. 12 point font, Times New Roman or Courier, name, email, title, wordcount in the upper right hand corner and name/title/page number at the top of every page. 

This is the easiest part imaginable. Just be professional. Be brief. Be on point. Be courteous and friendly. Be an avid user of spellcheck. Show that you have the bargain-basement skill to put one complete sentence after another with a period in between.

Don’t Be a Douchebag: Honestly, the hardest part about writing this section is going to be deciding which Fond Memories of Assery to use to illustrate my points. This is where a lot of authors mess up, and, I don’t want to make it weird, but mainly where male authors mess it up. I have received all of one query that fell into this category from a female author and some number approaching infinity from men. I don’t think it’s actually a gender essentialist thing, I think men are just more likely (more likely, not “definitely all have been”) to have never been told they weren’t the speciallest and most brilliant since birth. I’m not saying men are worse than women. I remember the bad ones. I don’t remember the good ones, I remember the stories the good ones were attached to, and those were always pretty evenly split. But when people break this rule, they break it hard. They break it with gusto. They break it for the record books. These are the ones that get dramatic readings.

Do not assume the recipient already knows who you are because you are just that awesome. EVEN IF YOU ARE JUST THAT AWESOME. EVEN IF YOU ARE FAMOUS AND QUERYING WORLDCON ABOUT BEING ON PROGRAMMING OR SOMETHING. There is always a chance the person on the other end has no idea who the eff you is, even if you is, in fact, Nicki Minaj. There is a very strong chance that the person on the end may know your work but not your name. (Totally random example: Catherynne Valente. *crickets* I wrote those Fairyland books. *omg what can I do for you*) It pays to be polite, introduce yourself, and give a SHORT selection of your credits. It makes you look humble if you are famous, and like a normal fucking person if you’re not. Get in the habit now.

When giving your credits, practice the three R’s: Restraint, Reality, and Relevancy. A credit is something that you have accomplished or written or done that is worthy of note. “I am a member of SFWA” is a credit. It tells the recipient that you have at least three pro sales. “I can bench press 300 pounds” is not, unless you are writing a fitness book, and even then, probably just let it be assumed. It is completely okay if you don’t have any writing credits yet—that’s what you’re trying to get right now! It’s perfectly acceptable to list your college degree, if you have one, or having been editor of a school paper, or that you were on The Real World but you’re better now. It is completely not okay to inform the editor of an SFF magazine that you have a type/institution unspecified “graduate degree” in medieval studies so you “probably know more” than them and absolutely nothing in this book is not precisely historically accurate. (Narrator: it wasn’t. It really, really wasn’t.) Or that you think the whole field is full of safe girly stories and you’re going to really explode their preconceptions with your story that has seventeen separate rapes on the first page. Or that you are extremely handsome (headshot attached). Or how fast you can run a mile or chug a beer. Or your hobbies. Or your romantic status. Or that you are the voice of your generation and they’d better hurry and publish you before they miss out. (Remember—all these are real.) Or that your story is probably too “edgy”, “challenging”, “dark”, or “high-brow” for their publication. 

A good rule of thumb is: if you think you’re being cute or funny or outrageous in order to differentiate yourself, probably just don’t. 

However—Restraint. Keep it to three of your most impressive credits. We do not need, want, nor will we read an entire CV. Reality—come on, son, don’t make up a credit or award or degree. Google exists. We can find out. Easily. This used to be something you could pull off with a little luck and that time is emphatically over. Relevancy—literally no one cares if you won 3rd prize in your 4th grade writing contest, or 2nd place in your middle school soccer tournament, or caught the biggest bass in Bass County, North Bass, unless you are writing a book about 4th grade writing contests, middle school soccer tournaments, or huge fuckoff bass. Research the agent or market you are querying and don’t include anything that isn’t relevant to them. And if you don’t have any significant credits, it’s fine to just skip to the pitch.

Do not actively insult the recipient or make reference to how they could improve their past work. Do not try to butter them up by praising that work, either. Your work is at issue, not theirs. A brief “I am a great admirer” is fine, but not really necessary, and it will have precisely zero effect on your chances unless (again, these are all real examples) you are submitting to an editor and try to front like you’re a fan but clearly just glanced at their Wikipedia page, got hit on the head, and when you came to, wrote down what you dreamed Wikipedia said about them. Do not submit a manuscript to them without an agent if they do not accetp unagented manuscripts because “agents are just a scam that gets between the author and the editor.”

Do not praise yourself. Do not refer to your book as “the greatest work of the 21st or perhaps any century” Do not include “blurbs” from your friends or family. Even if someone famous said something nice about you one time at band camp, you probably don’t need to include that in a query letter. Do not list how many followers you have on social media—it’s obnoxious, and it sounds like you’re trying to skip the “write a good book” part and go straight to “famous for being famous” part. Unless you’re trying to sell a book based on a novelty Twitter account. Relevancy, once again, is key. You can mention that you run a high-profile account if you do actually run one, but be aware that what you think of as a lot of followers may not be what a New York agent thinks of as a lot of followers. 

Whether or not you include information about your identity is up to you, but definitely do not make a judgement about that identity for the recipient, i.e. “I’m a straight white male so you probably already deleted this email.” I would say it’s best to include it only if it’s relevant to your work or the publication or agent in question, such as those actively seeking voices like yours, or if you’re trying to sell a book on the experience of transmen in America and happen to be a transman, or on growing up in Bali and were born in Bali, or an urban fantasy that grew out of your observations on the treatment of Asian immigrants in Australia that you observed by being an Asian immigrant in Australia etc. Otherwise, it’s generally not pertinent information no matter what that identity is, can sometimes hurt you because people are the utter worst, and, in the end, being born and raised in New York certainly isn’t relevant or unique enough to include when querying about a book set in another galaxy.

When pitching your book, do not assure the recipient that it is an “automatic bestseller” or “the book you’ve been waiting for.” Do not offer a subjective statement of any kind on the value of your own work—that is our job. We don’t need help. Do not include the text in the body of the email, attach a correctly-formatted manuscript like a civilized person. Do not ramble on so long about what your book is about that actually reading the book becomes redundant. This isn’t really a douchebag thing so much as one of the most common errors I saw when I was editing and one I made myself several times: do not withhold the most interesting aspect of your work from the pitch because you want the agent or editor to be surprised or discover it organically when they read it. They may not get there. I’m not saying you have to be all “Bruce Willis was dead all along in my book” but you have to say “there are a lot of dead people in this book, Haley Joel Osment can see them, Bruce Willis is not what he seems” not just “A guy talks to a weird kid for just…super awkward amounts of time and everyone is sad in Philadelphia but tee hee there’s a secret.”

Do not swear. 

If asked for revisions, decide whether you want to do them, do them if you like, if not, thank the recipient politely. Do not say “you have no taste” or “you don’t know what you’re missing” or “I only write for myself anyway so I don’t care what you think” or “Fuck you.” We do remember, and we know how to label senders in Gmail, and future submissions will go straight to the trash because those are trash things to say.

Do not demand an immediate response.  Do not imply there’s some kind of ticking time bomb before you send it to someone else. If you have sent out simultaneous submissions, make sure the recipient is cool with that. Do not, for the love of all that is elvish, sign in Elvish, or French (unless you and the recipient are both French and you are writing in French) or middle English, or Klingon, or with an ASCII panda bear, or an emoji (NO EMOJIS), or “your devoted servant” or with a quote from a David Mamet play, or any quote, or, and I fucking mean it, “Love.”

Just sit at your desk, imagine a query letter that would irritate the shit out of you, and don’t do any of those things. 

Don’t Be a Wallflower: This is the other end of the mistake-snake. You’re querying to get published. Don’t be shy. Don’t apologize for your book or say it’s “probably not that good but what the hell” or “my therapist said this would be good for me” or mention previous rejections or say “if you don’t take this story I guess it’s time for me to quit” or even “I’m sure you’re very busy and I don’t want to waste your time but…”

Be assertive, straightforward, and plainspoken. When pitching your book, do not say anything that bears even the slightest family resemblance to “It’s kind of hard to explain, but…” Don’t close by saying “I understand if you don’t get back to me.” You are worthy of the recipient’s time, but not entitled to it. You believe in your book and yourself, you would like it if the recipient believed in it, too, but you don’t need them to to keep on living on planet earth, that’s all. 

So with all those things to avoid, what should you do?

Just keep it simple and professional. 1-3-3-1. One sentence to greet the recipient, maximum three sentences introducing yourself and your credits, if you have any, maximum three sentences describing what you want, whether that’s a reading slot at a con or an agent or pitching your work, one sentence to close. almost all these mistakes come from wanting to “stand out from the pack.” But they all make you stand out as the worst wolf. The pack, in this case, is good, because it’s a pack of wolves who know how to conduct themselves professionally, and seem like they might be tolerable to work with.

Pitching the book is a big roadblock, and there are as many seminars and guides to pitching as there are to querying, if not way, way more. But you must have a pitch. It took me way too long to figure out that “it’s hard to explain but kind of like Arabian Nights I guess but not really idk” is not a pitch, elevator or otherwise. It’s fine and accepted to compare it to other books. X Meets Y is a classic because it give the recipient something to hang their hat on in terms of expectations. Honestly, if you can get it down to one sentence, especially for a short story or novella, that’s best. You can include it as a tagline if you need to use your three sentences to fully get the idea out there, or let it stand on its own. I sold The Refrigerator Monologues on The Vagina Monologues for Superheroes’ Girlfriends, The Glass Town Game on The Brontes go to Narnia, Space Opera on Eurovision in space, and Palimpsest as an urban fantasy about a sexually-transmitted city. State your genre, the length, your hopeful audience (YA, middle grade, adult, etc) and a very brief description of the most interesting, attention-grabbing aspects of your work. You don’t need to list the people who have inspired you or whose career you hope to emulate. Just focus on the work, and pretend like you’re already writing the back cover copy. Many, and I mean many, of my original pitches have ended up as the final cover copy for my books.

Do not say anything that shares taxonomy with WHAT HAPPENS NEXT? YOU’LL JUST HAVE TO READ IT AND FIND OUT! Ending with a question is fine, though perhaps not stellar as it’s quite hackneyed and honestly, the answer to any question you end a pitch with will almost always be “yes, obviously” in the actual story (Will Stacey save the earth from ravening hordes of electro-possums? Will she find true love in the basement of a bombed-out Waffle House? Will she overcome her fear of commitment and/or driving stickshift?) but let the manuscript be the answer, and don’t try to tease cutely or make a choose your own adventure out of the query letter or, and again, I am so serious right now, write the entire query letter in the style of a movie trailer, the book itself, AND/OR FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF THE MAIN CHARACTER. 

In the end, it’s very, very simple.

Dear Mr or Ms. Pleaseloveme,

My name is Author Q. Neatstuff. I would like to submit my story/novel Scattered, Smothered, and Stacey to you/your magazine/your publishing house for representation/publication. I am an active member of SFWA. I have been published in Fancypants Magazine, The Year’s Best Extruded Product 2015, and my novelette The Texas Toast in the Shell was published in 2016 in Clarkesworld Magazine and long-listed for the Huge Deal Award. (Alternatively: I am a recent graduate of Bass County College with a Bachelor’s in Juggling. While attending BCC, I ran the Bigass Bass Literary Review and had a regular column in Smallmouth Weekly, a local independent paper. I also maintain a high-traffic Twitter account under the name of @ShitBassSay.)

Scattered, Smothered, and Stacey is a post-apocalyptic dystopia in which electro-possums have taken over the southeastern United States and created a truly equal and prosperous society—with no room for humans. Stacey is a member of the resistance, an upcoming young lifestyle blogger expelled from her home in Louisiana and forced to live with the other freedom fighters in the basement of a once-lively Waffle House, fighting against the hyper-intelligent marsupial/machine oppressors. But when she meets Baldtail, a rebellious electro-possum who possesses the secrets of both time travel and the perfect chili, they will have to choose between love, loyalty, and the mysterious jukebox at the center of the war. Scattered, Smothered, and Stacey is The Terminator meets Ratatouille. The final manuscript is approximately 80,000 words. 

Attached are the first three chapters. I hope you enjoy them.

Thank you for your time,

Author Q. Neatstuff

www.authorqneatstuff.com

It really isn’t any more complicated than that. All the rest of it, all the strategies and secret tips, just get in the way of a very simple professional communication whose only job is not to piss anyone off so much they don’t give the manuscript a chance. It’s not a Tinder profile, it’s not a blog post, and it’s definitely not a heartfelt letter from the depths of your soul. Do not fight the balrog or insult its intelligence. Become one with the balrog. And if you fail, get up, wash your clothes, and try balrog again. 

Focus on the book, let the book sell itself. 

All you need to do is be its wingman.