Ah, the query letter. The single page whose perfection or lack thereof can make or break your chances of even having an agent or publisher look at your work; in fact, it’s all many agents will even ask to see at first. Their rationale, and it’s a reasonable one, is that if you can’t put together an attention-grabbing one-page letter, you’re probably not going to be able to structure a readable novel either.
Query letters are the subject of whole books and hundreds of web sites worth of information, opinions, and examples; just try Googling them! Their format is fairly straightforward and the good news is that they only need to be a page long. The bad news is, of course, that they need to be only a page long. With that one page, you need to make an agent or publisher interested in your specific current work and in you as a writer.
As far as general layout, any standard business letter format is acceptable. As mentioned above, confine your letter to a single printed page. Make it single spaced with 1”-ish margins, and use pretty much any font that’s easy to read and not too wide, narrow, tall, fancy, or weird. Courier, times, arial, etc., are fine; cursive fonts, futuristic type, etc., will get your letter filed under “My eyes! My eeeeyyyyyeees!”, and blinding an agent is not a good way to start a relationship with him or her.
What follows is a disassembly of my first cut at a query letter for my current book.
Donald Lloyd
6969 My Road
Someplace, DE 99999
Home Phone: (555)-555-5555
E-mail: me@wherethehellever.com
Standard stuff here. Tell them who you are and how to contact you in the event they’re smitten by your work.
Agent McPublisher
1313 Bestseller Ave
Most Likely New York, NY 00000
Again, fairly normal letter formatting, but I should touch on the importance of who you address your letter to. Rather than listing the name of the agency or publishing house you’re querying, check out their web site or listings in Writers Guide to try to find out who specifically within that organization handles queries in the genre in which you’ve written. Address it to “Agent McPublisher” rather than “Book Hawkers, Inc” when at all possible.
Dear Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss McPublisher,
This seemingly straightforward line is more important than you’d think. If you send a query to a “Mr. McPublisher”, but “mister” McP’s first name is Elizabeth, not only have you potentially offered insult, but you’ve shown that your attention to detail is not sufficient to have researched who you’re writing to. On almost every blog or site I’ve seen where an agent has posted an example of a winning query letter, that agent has expressed gratitude to the author for getting the salutation correct.
I am seeking representation for my fantasy novel, Spirit’s End, complete at 132,000 words. Enclosed are (whatever your submission guidelines ask for).
(Yes, I’ve decided to combine the 2 books into a single volume, and Spirit’s End is the working title.)
We’re still in the pure informational part of the letter. Start with a simple paragraph stating your book’s name, genre, and length. Agents’ and publishers’ submission guidelines vary and are usually listed on their web sites. Find them and follow them, and unless it’s a query letter only, indicate the contents of your submission here to confirm that you can follow simple instructions.
Many agents will ask for only a query letter at first contact; others will want a letter and a few pages or a few chapters, and still others will add a synopsis into the mix somewhere. Give them what they ask for.
On what should be his proudest day, a young man finds himself banished from his home for the role he might play in fulfilling an ancient prophecy of doom; his life is shattered by a few lines of bad poetry on a dusty old scroll. Half a world away, a young woman and a surly monk board ship to flee from persecution in the land of their birth. Their searches for purpose, aid, and redemption bring them together in a land on the cusp of war. As events beyond their control seemingly drive them toward the fate predicted for their world by the Star Gods of antiquity, they must ask themselves how to avert this foretold destiny and, more importantly… whether or not they should.
This is where the sales pitch begins. Picture the blurbs on the back covers of books you’ve read. This section is your blurb: your chance, in 1-3 short paragraphs, to convince a potential reader (in this case, the agent or publisher) that your book is worth reading.
I am the author of “The Sillymarillion: An Unauthorized Parody of J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘The Silmarillion’”, from Cold Spring Press. “Beyond Bree”, the newsletter for Tolkien fans within the MENSA organization, called my book “a highly warped, yet extremely funny alternate Middle-earth”, saying “D.R. Lloyd brilliantly captures the structure of Tolkien’s original, not only paying homage to it but render[ing] a heart-wrenching good laugh at the same time.”
This is another blurb, but here you need to sell yourself rather than your book. If your writing has been published in the past, indicate it here if it’s at all relevant. If you have some career or life experience that makes you uniquely qualified to write about your topic of choice, that goes here too. (“My 30 years as an amateur plumber and my history as a stoned hippie in the ‘60s make me well suited to write the science fiction vampire novel, ‘The Groovy Pipewrench Massacre, Man!”)
There are times when this paragraph should simply be left out. “I’m qualified to write fantasy because I’ve read a lot of it”, or the equivalent, will probably not be helpful. Listing self- or vanity-published books with your name on the cover will probably count against you, so just try to pretend they never happened.
I look forward to hearing from you, and I hope to establish a mutually beneficial relationship which will carry forward to future works of both traditional and humorous fantasy I intend to produce.
Sincerely,
Donald R. Lloyd, II
The closing is straightforward as well. Thank the person for his or her time and sign off. The line about future relationship is a little non-standard, but I figure it can’t hurt to mention that I’m a potential source of long-term profit for them.