5 Surefire Ways to a Trashed Query

Kathleen Bolton on Apr 30 2007 | Filed under: CRAFT, REAL WORLD

I’ve been cleaning off my messy writing space in a semi-annual effort, and amid the overlooked corn chips and mutant dust bunnies, I found a battered folder that I thought I’d trashed long ago. Inside were an embarrassing amount of old query letters from projects I’d forgotten all about.

God, how they sucked. No wonder agents and editors seem to hit the bottle at around 3 p.m. on a weekday.

Since then I’ve become much better at writing a query, skills burned in the furnace of rejection. I’ve learned to avoid five pitfalls to a rejected (or worse, ignored) query letter.

• Failure to give them a hook or a logline in the first couple sentences. Agents skim through all the blah blah for the idea that’s supposed to entice them. Make it easy on them by having it in the first paragraph.
• Failure to get to the point, quickly. After the hook, give them the genre and page count. Then they can determine the scope of the project, and if it’s right for them.
• Hemming and hawing. Avoid it. As in “It’s always been my dream to write a novel, and now my dream is nearly complete…” If you have life experience relevant to the story, mention it in as few words as you need, then get on with it. Ex: “My job as an ER nurse in an inner-city hospital inspired my thriller THE NURSE MURDERS.”
• Typos. C’mon, people.
• And finally, make sure you get the agent’s name right. I screwed this up on my first mass mail, done in the days before e-queries were acceptable. I had 10 crisp lovelies all ready to go, and I was so anxious about the whole thing, I mixed up the envelopes.

All you need the query to do is open the door to the partial and let the agent or editor know you are not a fruit loop. They can find that out later. :-)

Kathleen Bolton is co-founder of Writer Unboxed. She has written two novels under the pseudonym Cassidy Calloway: Confessions of a First Daughter, and Secrets of a First Daughter--both books in a YA series about the misadventures of the U.S. President's teen-aged daughter, published by HarperCollins.

Kathleen Bolton

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8 Comments »

8 Responses to “5 Surefire Ways to a Trashed Query”

1. thea says:

   April 30, 2007 at 10:05 am

   every editor i’ve talked to wants the facts, just the facts. thanks for the reminder, kathleen.

   Like? 0
2. Kathleen Bolton says:

   April 30, 2007 at 10:59 am

   Those early queries were soooo embarrassing. And I’m not even going to get into the synopses. Exercises in puerile junk!

   Like? 0
3. Therese Walsh says:

   April 30, 2007 at 11:51 am

   I had 10 crisp lovelies all ready to go, and I was so anxious about the whole thing, I mixed up the envelopes. Ouch! Writers’ growing pains truly hurt, don’t they?

   Thanks for the post, Kath.

   Like? 0
4. Melissa Marsh says:

   April 30, 2007 at 1:46 pm

   Great tips, Kathleen.

   Like? 0
5. Nienke says:

   April 30, 2007 at 5:08 pm

   So simple yet so hard.
   As a writer/editor by day – I find it good practice to write something, put it away for a day or two and then check it with a fresh eye. Some of us are just to ‘send’ or ‘mail’ happy!

   BTW, check out my April 30 post!

   Like? 0
6. Trish Ryan says:

   April 30, 2007 at 8:28 pm

   Oh, if folders like that only disintegrated after a 60 day expiration date! My primary solace, as I think back over all the truly awful queries I sent out into the agentsphere, is that they weren’t quite bad enough to be memorable, just bad enough to be trashed quickly. Sometimes it’s best to be forgotten :)

   Like? 0
7. Buffy says:

   May 2, 2007 at 10:57 am

   Brilliant. Thanks for this.

   Like? 0
8. Kev says:

   May 8, 2007 at 5:52 am

   You know, I suspect it has a lot to do with the calibre and maturity of your sense of your own work. It shows pretty quickly when you want something to be what it is not.

   If you know where it is at, whether it deserves your complete faith and have at least a semi profession sense of honesty, you don’t need to add all the hoo ha to try and sell it, you just tell it how it is and say what needs to be said… perhaps.

   I spent short time going through submissions in a publisher a way back, and while there spent something like two days going through submissions. After a while I stopped reading the actual work and just worked off the feel of the letter.

   So many of them spoke about the writer’s hope for the piece, as you point out, something of a turn off.

   As human beings, it seems as though anything we do that involves the same old stuff over and over again turns on kind of natural filters for the familiar, the try hard and the uninspiring, and keeps a feeler out for something grown up, focused and engaging.

   I had a long conversation with a friend and literary colleague about this a while back, and her view was that too many query or intro letters don’t actually talk about the core of what a book is about. That I suspect is what an agent or – though these days how many of them even look at stuff not through agents – a publisher wants to know.

   In this case she was actually reading a query letter I had wrote and commenting on it, and said, that is all very well, but tell me what the book is about. When I could not actually do this without sprouting reams of waffle and talk of great plotlines and themes, I realised the book was not ready to be pitched. I had a lot of hopes for the piece, but not enough genuine grasp of what I was doing.

   But then this is trying the … write a few chapters and a synopsis approach, which does seem to be a good idea these days unless you are loved and trusted in the first place.

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