One of my favorite sayings is this: “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” Variously attributed to Mark Twain, Blaise Pascal, and Winston Churchill, this sentiment has been on my mind lately because I have been revising a query letter.
A query letter is the first piece of writing a literary agent reads from an author cold-pitching a book to them. For the book I am currently querying, I have reached Version Number Six of my query letter. And with each successive attempt, the letter has gotten shorter, clearer, and more concise.
In the first version, the letter tried to cram too much of the plot of the book into its limited word count. I talked about all three main characters without managing to mention the stakes and complications of the story. I spent a paragraph on the premise, the setting, and the genre conventions I was subverting. My bio paragraph was bloated and apologetic. The whole letter was 465 words, and it was a mess.
I wrote the second and third versions following a great querying workshop I attended via the Manuscript Academy. I streamlined the plot down to the “mainest” of the main characters (or so I thought) and sort of shoehorned in the stakes, but I was still running into the problem of having three POV (point-of-view) characters and wanting to talk about all of them. The mainest character disappeared in the second plot paragraph, and I actually talked about the secondary main character’s stakes instead. But it was getting shorter. The third version clocked in at 320 words.
The fourth version tweaked #3 after another querying workshop and actually made the thing worse. It meandered back up to 329 words, many of them intensely extraneous. Version Five looked a lot like #4 but I wrote a new beginning that said absolutely EVERYTHING I thought needed to be communicated about this book in two long and convoluted sentences. I was very proud of Query 5.0, which came in at a trim 315 words.
Then, yesterday my writing group met online to talk about querying, and one of the speakers reminded us of something I had not really thought about in all my attempts at the query. The ONLY job of a query letter is to get the agent to read your sample pages. That’s it.
I had been so worried that the agent would get the wrong idea from my sample pages that I thought I needed to communicate the book’s distinctiveness loud and clear in the query letter – hence the impenetrable opening sentences. That worry should have had me going back to my opening pages and asking myself why they weren’t communicating the book’s distinctiveness. But instead I just tried to write the query in such a way as to promise the agent, “No, really, you’ll see what I’m doing by the time you get to Chapter 3.”
The problem with that, of course, is that most agents only ask for the first five or ten pages of your manuscript. There better be a hook in those pages or they’re not sticking around, no matter how good the query letter is.
So I had it backwards. I was trying to use the query letter to make up for the deficiencies in my opening pages, rather than fixing the opening pages, which would, in turn, make for a simpler query letter. This summer, I added the “Chapter Zero” that I talked about a few weeks ago here. That simple addition does everything necessary to introduce the type of book you’re reading and sets up the right expectations. And now those first labyrinthine sentences of the query aren’t necessary.
With the help of my writing friend Ron, I’ve written Version Six of the query letter. It cuts all the extraneous stuff from the beginning and recasts the plot paragraphs to make them clearer. The whole focus is to send the agent to the sample pages instead of trying to explain to them what I’m doing. I am finally confident enough in the beginning of the book to let it stand on its own.
Of course it took me six query versions, at least as many revisions to the opening pages, and over 60 failed queries that I sent WAY TOO SOON to get to this point. But such is the process of staggering one’s way into the world of traditional publishing.
I’ve spent a very long time trying to write a shorter, clearer letter. The newest version of the query weighs in a bit heavier than Version Five at 337 words, but I’m hoping this time they’re the right ones.
Adam Thomas, Author 