Those of you who aren’t writers (you lucky bastards) may not be familiar with what a query letter is (you lucky bastards). And those of you who are writers probably aren’t even reading this post right now because you got triggered by the words “Query Letter” in the title and ran off to break things.
In essence, a query letter is the first step a writer must take to get rejected … er, I mean to get their manuscript published by a traditional book publisher. It is a formal letter—often an email these days—a writer sends to a literary agent in hopes of getting the agent excited enough to ask to read the writer's manuscript. If the agent asks to read the manuscript, and they like it and believe in its salability, they will offer to represent the author and shop the manuscript around to various publishing houses with the aim of landing a solid book deal.
Simple, right?
HA! (Sorry, I didn’t mean to shout-laugh with such anger and bitterness and scorn.)
Depending on whom you ask, literary agents reject between 96% and 110% of the submissions they receive. That means only about 4% to negative 10% of writers ever land an agent. And without an agent, a writer stands between a 0% and a negative 522% chance of being offered a book deal by a large, reputable publisher. I’m not trying to discourage anyone—I’m merely stating totally accurate math I definitely didn’t make up.
Such stark statistics are why you often see aspiring authors sobbing at cafés and in bars and on subways and atop suspension bridges. Such statistics are also why, if you’re a writer seeking a traditional publishing deal, you have to totally nail your query letter.
But here’s the thing: Even if you nail your query letter, you’re still unlikely to land a literary agent. Agents receive hundreds if not thousands of query letters each month, and unless J.K. Rowling or Stephen King is referring you, your query will barely be skimmed. Even if an agent reads your query and likes it and asks to read your manuscript, they likely won’t offer you representation unless your manuscript was ghostwritten by J.K. Rowling or Stephen King. I’m not trying to discourage anyone—I’m merely stating totally accurate facts completely free of any frustration or bitterness or scorn on my part.
So, if you’re a writer seeking an agent, you have two choices: 1) You can spend weeks perfecting your query letter and then a few more weeks personalizing it for each agent you want to query, and then a couple of months stressing out while waiting to receive each agent’s rejection notification, assuming they take the time to send one; OR 2) You can spend about ten minutes writing a horrible query letter and sending it out to all the agents at once without personalizing it, thus saving you months of emotional anguish and freeing you up to do what you truly love: writing another novel nobody will represent or publish.
I highly recommend option two. And am here to help.
To write a truly horrible query letter, you first need to know what constitutes a truly great query letter and then do the exact opposite when writing yours. Following is a list of what top literary agents and other experts in publishing typically cite as essential attributes of a query letter that works:
The agent is formally and properly addressed.
The book’s genre is clearly stated and one that the agent has expressed interest in.
No tpyos or grammatical. Errors.
Strong hook.
The book’s appeal isn’t exaggerated.
The bio section provides only the most relevant info about the author.
The submission guidelines are followed to a T.
Now, using the above bulleted items (or, more accurately, not using them) we are ready to quickly compose a monumentally bad query letter—one that won’t cause you or the writer in your life to bang your/their head against your/their laptop while crying out “Why? Why?” once the rejections start rolling in.
My Darling Gatekeeper/Dream-Maker:
I am seeking representation for my contemporary upmarket(ish)/literary neo-noir suspense psychological thriller sci-fi fantasy novel. It does not yet have a title—I figured you could come up with a better one than I can. The book is complete at 75,000 words or 100,000 words, depending on whether I decide to keep the chapter at the end that describes how the main character has been dead the whole time. The book, which will appeal to everybody who likes the best books, can be described as Gone Girl meets The Hunger Games meets The Martian meets The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
Based on your interest in and huge success selling commercial romance fiction, I think it’s time you faced your conscience and starting handling much better books that are more like mine. I’m going to grab your attention now with the hook:
In a world where nothing is as it seems, former private investigator Jock Janson comes out of retirement to take on one last case before going back into retirement for good—unless another really intriguing case presents itself later.
Jock’s client, Ms. X, says she’ll pay Jock triple his normal rate if he can find out who murdered her husband. Jock assures her he can and will. There’s just one problem: Jock interrupted Ms. X before she could explain that she’s from the future and her husband was murdered fifty years from now. But if there’s one thing Jock needs even more than learning to stop interrupting clients, it’s money, so he takes the case. There’s just one more problem: Jock’s been dead the whole time. Or not. What do you think—should I have him be dead the whole time?
I’m going to move into the bio section of this query letter now so you can learn a little about me.
A little about me: I’m an author of contemporary upmarket(ish)/literary neo-noir suspense thriller sci-fi fantasy fiction who’s not very good at deciding on book titles or endings. I was the recipient of over 100 gold stars from my fourth grade English teacher. And while I have never won any official writing awards as an adult, my entry forms and fees have been accepted by top award sponsors on many occasions. I also like ping-pong.
Rather than paste the first ten pages of my manuscript into the body of this email as you specifically request on your website, I have attached the entire manuscript. This way you can read the whole thing before making any decisions about representation. Smart, right?
Thank you very much for taking the time to review my work. Don’t forget to come up with a great title.
Catch ya on the flipside.
Sincerely,
The Next Big Thing
That’s it. That’s how it’s done. Horrible query letters like the one above not only eliminate the months of “will they or won’t they” angst that come with querying literary agents these days; such letters also help writers release years of frustration in a lighthearted and almost healthy way. And who knows—maybe one of the agents who receives the letter will have an affinity for satire and career suicide, and thus may actually end up offering representation based solely on the writer's hubris.
But probably definitely not.
On a completely unrelated and blatantly capitalistic note, my novel THE EXIT MAN—which was optioned by both HBO and Showtime for development into a TV series—is now available for the embarrassingly low price of $0.99 at the following retail sites:
