Query letters

Your Story’s Valentine to the World

February 14, 2019 By Kathryn Craft 17 Comments

Since it’s Valentine’s Day, I’m going to detour from my more typical craft posts to talk about the art of seduction.

Mm-hmm, that’s right: we’re going to talk submission packages.

I hear you, already moaning with anticipation and pleasure (although you’re ahead of yourself: this usually doesn’t come until the climax). Your attitude is on the right track. The only way to beg interest in your manuscript as it heads into the world is through a well-designed submission package. How will you wrap it—in the negativity with which so many approach the tasks of query letter and synopsis writing, or with the wily passion befitting your novel’s love letter to the world?

This post is not intended to help you craft these all-important documents. I’ll include links to other great WU posts for that. My aim is to help you love them, by showing how they work together to seduce a reader. (If you are seeking traditional publication, “reader” means an agent or small-press editor. If self-publishing, and using such material for back-cover copy, “reader” may be the end purchaser.)

Think these materials are too brief to fairly represent your project? Think string bikini. You might be surprised how revealing they can be. Let’s look at each aspect of the package in terms of its function.

Query: The Hook

The query is the bedrock of the submission package. This letter may be all an agent ever sees, since many request a query only. Rest assured that if written well, it is enough to earn an invitation to send additional pages. If you’ve ever bought a novel based on back-cover copy alone, you know this can work.

In just a few paragraphs, the query letter suggests whether you are ready to make the transition from writer to published author. Its opening is your pitch: one or two concise, enticing, cogent paragraphs meant to align us with your protagonist’s goal, hook us with its major complications, and suggest why any of this matters.

Note the italicized words.

Concise: In one or two paragraphs, you must suggest the arc of your entire novel. An arc has spring and snap. Each word is vital; bait the hook and reel in the reader. Bloated, ineffective prose will poorly represent your writing skills.
Enticing: As with speed-dating, waste no time delineating past breakups. Focus on this manuscript’s best features.
Cogent: This is not the place to be cagey. Communicate your protagonist’s core problem and how you will complicate it. The words you choose will layer in your understanding about what sells in your genre. If this agent represents the genre, the words will speak to him.
Hook: Each sentence should build upon the last until you arrive at the story question. A hook does not need to be huge to be effective; it has to be barbed. Don’t waste space conveying plot. Your pitch has hit its mark when you’ve enticed the agent to read more.

Including word count proves you can produce within an acceptable target. Your bio will convey your understanding that writing careers are not plucked from thin air; they are built on platform.

Love the query, for the way it shows you are ready for this relationship.

Synopsis: Story Structure

The purpose of the synopsis is to assess your storytelling ability. [Read more…]

How Writing and Submitting Short Stories Improved My Novel

January 16, 2019 By Arthur Klepchukov 16 Comments

If you’re writing a novel and are nowhere near the end, why spend time on short stories? Doesn’t that distraction delay getting to the end of the current draft, a moment that always feels months away? I thought so once. One year, I wouldn’t let myself touch any other project until I’d worked on my novel every day. This lasted five months until I revisited “The End.” Again.

Why should a novel writer devote precious writing time to short stories? After five novel drafts, two years of submitting shorter fiction, and seven publications, here are my reasons.

Do Something With All Those Ideas

Not every idea deserves a novel. And there’s something cathartic about expressing an idea soon after inspiration strikes. I’m not holding my breath and suffocating the idea because I have to focus elsewhere. As powerful as some ideas feel in the moment, most are quite happy as short stories or flash fiction or poems, or being expressed at all. I now tend to start each idea in the shortest possible form. I only expand the word count if my gut and reader feedback suggest there’s more to say. In the meantime, I grow my list of stories and drafts, not only my list of ideas.

Understand the Impact of Every Edit

An effective edit rarely moves me in the same way as what inspired the story. Revising a longer work can be a dreary process because it’s difficult to grasp the impact of my efforts. This is not the case with flash fiction. Try changing a word in a 100-word story, swap sentences in 250 words, or drop a paragraph among only 1,000 words. You’ll notice an immediate impact on the entire piece. This inspires me toward better revisions by reminding me how powerful each change can be.

Feel A Sense of Completion More Often

Novel drafts take months or years to write. Short story drafts can take weeks. Flash fiction, anything under 1,000 words, can be even briefer. I’m not saying shorter work is easier to write, or requires any less thoughtful revision. But the satisfaction of reaching the end of a draft will happen sooner with shorter fiction. This can prevent listlessness after always having the same answer for “what are you working on?”

Practice Finding Comps

I read every market to which I submit. If I want a literary journal to publish my story, I not only follow their submission guidelines, [Read more…]

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Query Letters Part 2: The Extras

September 10, 2016 By Annie Neugebauer

Last time, after doing my best to convince you that it’s worth the work to master the query letter, I went through the most important part of said query letter: the pitch. If you’re already set up with an agent and editor and/or are publishing on your own, that’s pretty much all you need. But if you’re actually querying, what else should go in your query letter?

Enter: the extras. I say ‘extras’ because, yes, at its heart the most important part of any query letter is the pitch. Without a good, intriguing pitch of your book, no one will ask to see more. But don’t let that word choice fool you into thinking these other components don’t matter, because they absolutely do. They can, if done well, even push a ‘maybe’ into a ‘request.’ If a pitch comes across as so-so, intriguing comp titles, a killer bio, or even a perfectly-worded intro paragraph may well urge an agent to ask to see more.

[Note that the goal of a query letter is not to sell your book or even to land an agent; the goal of a query letter is to get an agent interested enough to read your manuscript, which must do the rest. :)]

So let’s break down the extras that can go into your query letter, with some things I’ve learned about each. I say “can go” because most of these things are at least arguably optional, and could be left out or minimized on a case-by-case basis. Still, we’ll cover each.

Personalization

I’m starting with this one, which I personally think is the least important, because it usually goes first. The idea is to include a brief (brief!) introductory paragraph that’s personalized to each specific agent that you’re querying, either letting them know why you chose them or reminding them how you’ve met, interacted, etc.

Now, I didn’t always do this, and you’ll hear a lot of conflicting information about whether or not you should – even from agents themselves. If you know that an agent you’re querying prefers them, go ahead and do it. If you know he/she hates them, leave it out. And if you don’t know, my rule of thumb is to only include something if it feels genuinely personal and genuinely relevant. In other words, don’t force a faux-personalized intro. “I saw from your list that you’re looking for (insert your genre here)” isn’t likely to impress. You having done your research is presumed.

But if you loved their talk about your genre at a conference, are critique partners with one of their clients, or pal around all the time on Twitter, go ahead and use that to connect them with who you are. This is also the place to mention referrals, previous requests, pitch contests, etc. Don’t have any of those things? (Disclaimer: never make them up.) I lean towards skipping it; save your space for your amazing pitch and bio.

The Stats

This is what I think of as the second most important section of your letter, after the pitch. The stats. The goods. The hard facts. A stats paragraph can appear anywhere in the letter (but is typically seen either as the opener or right before the closer; fine arguments can be made for either) and should include: 1) title 2) age level, 3) genre, 4) word count, and 5) comps. [Read more…]

Query Letters Part 1: The Pitch

July 9, 2016 By Annie Neugebauer

Last time I did my best to convince you that the query letter is a skill worth mastering. The heart of the query, your pitch, is useful not just for querying agents but also for the back of your book, pitching to editors, plotting, problem-solving, and even brainstorming. Naturally, the next big question is, “Okay, how do I write one?”

Unfortunately, there’s not a one-size-fits-all answer to that question. Every query pitch is unique, as is every writer’s path to getting out a good one. Unless you have an extremely lucky knack for them, the answer will almost certainly involve lots of study, work, practice, repetition, practice, critique, and did I mention practice?

Nonetheless, there are certain nearly-universal guidelines you can use to get started. Today I’m going to give you my version of these in hopes that they help you with your own pitch writing, but keep in mind that reading and writing many pitches really is the best way to ingrain the pattern into your brain. Aside from going to bookstores and libraries to read the backs of lots of books (what works to make you want to keep reading? why? what doesn’t? why?), there are many wonderful resources for writers such as Query Shark, Agent Query Connect, and Writer’s Digest where you can read real query letters and commentary on them.

And here’s one more important thing to keep in mind with your query: a pitch is not a summary. The goal of a summary is to encapsulate everything that happens in your book. The goal of a pitch is to make someone want to read more of your book. This means intentionally picking and choosing which information to include and which to leave out. Intrigue is a great way to pique interest.

What Goes In Your Pitch

The skeletal structure of most pitches will look something like this:

Attention-grabber
Essential Premise
Protagonist
- Goal
- Motivation
- Obstacle
- Stakes
Antagonist
- Goal
- Motivation
- Stakes
Supporting Character
- Motivation
Closing Hook

Of course, by the time you write it into sentences that flow from one to the next and make coherent sense, they might be in a different order, and you might have extra tidbits thrown in or even an element or two missing. That’s just fine, as long as the pitch works as a whole.

The attention-grabber should be your first sentence. Sometimes this will be your “elevator pitch.” Sometimes it won’t. Regardless, it should be in some way compelling. Depending on your genre, it can be witty, disturbing, surprising, gorgeous, funny, or anything else that will make a tired reader perk up. Don’t hold back; now is your time to hit ‘em with your best shot.

What I’m calling “essential premise” here isn’t necessary for all books/genres. I’m talking about world-building basics. Contemporary novels can often skip this unless the setting is unusual, but any speculative genre will need to give some basics so we know if we’re in a medieval fantasy village, a post-apocalyptic wasteland, or a radioactive cupcake factory. If the rest of the query doesn’t make sense unless you know the setting/premise, which also applies to time period and location, take a sentence or two to capture it.

Then get to the meat. Who’s your protagonist? What does he or she want? Why? What’s in her way? What happens if she can’t get it? These things should be in all pitches.

The antagonist should get some time too, though likely not as much. Who is he? (What’s in his way will likely be your protagonist.) What’s at stake if he fails or succeeds? [Read more…]

Don’t Hate the Query Letter: Master It

May 14, 2016 By Annie Neugebauer

There is nothing in the world that makes my critique group members groan louder than when someone brings in a query letter. It seems everyone hates query letters. Me? I’m the weirdo who gets excited.

Before you leave because I’m obviously insane, let me explain.

I didn’t always love query letters. I used to dread them like any self-respecting writer. But if you’re seeking traditional publication (and actually, self-publishing too, but we’ll get to that), they’re a necessary evil. There are very few ways to land an agent without first mastering the art of the query letter. So that’s what I set out to do, slowly but surely, by torturing my critique group with all of my drafts and versions and projects until one day, one time, something just sort of… clicked.

[Note: Query letters generally consist of several parts: an introductory greeting, a 1-2 paragraph pitch or summary, an informational paragraph that includes word count, genre, market potential and/or comparison titles, a bio paragraph, and a closing. For the purpose of this blog, I’m referring only to that 1-2 paragraph pitch – the “meat” of your query letter – as the query.]

To prove that I don’t have some sort of supernatural innate query skillz, let me share this with you: the query for my first novel got 0 requests. The query for my second got 2 requests for partials. Ouch, right?

With the query for my third novel I brought in a draft and my crit group said it was a hot mess. I started over. I brought it in another time before I had the base that was worth line-editing and polishing up. That query letter got me 7 requests for the full manuscript. Ah-ha. I was onto something. (Unfortunately, the manuscript wasn’t nearly as ready as the query, but that’s a blog for another day.)

So when it came time to query my fourth novel, I was merciless. I took in four or five entirely different versions to my critique group. They wanted to throttle me, but they were honest, and that’s what you need in order to learn what works. When I landed on the right version, that was my click. I got it. I felt it. There’s a rhythm and a style to that type of summary that once you have, you have. (The best way to find this is to write lots of them. The next best way is to read the back jackets of books similar to yours and see how/why the good ones work.) I polished it up and got 15 requests for the full, which resulted in 3 offers of representation. And here’s the really sneaky part: that query letter became the pitch letter my agent and I used to go on sub, too, which also resulted in multiple requests.

Oh, and, self-pubbers? Here’s an unpleasant little tidbit. You need the query too; you just call it “back-cover copy.” I suspect that there isn’t a novelist in existence who gets to avoid the dreaded 2-paragraph book pitch. At its core, it’s your query letter, your pitch letter, and the back of your book. So rather than pitching a fit (puns!), seeing if you can slide by without it, or settling for a less than stellar pitch, why not bite the bullet and master the art of crafting your query?

Maybe your sparkling personality can land you an agent in-person. Maybe your rock star agent writes your pitch letters for you. And maybe you’ll hire an editor to write your back-cover copy. If that were me, I would still value the query, and here’s why: I use it for several other things. I use it before I write books. I use it to analyze flaws in written books. I use it to brainstorm new book ideas. Once you stop thinking of the query letter as something invented to make you miserable, you can start implementing it as an incredibly useful tool. Let’s unpack that. Reason by reason, here’s the value I see in mastering the query. [Read more…]