Dec 30 2008
A Query Letter Rant
It occurred to me that, ever since I started my precious blog, I never wrote on the topic of query letters–
Query letters, the all-important letter that rivals that of a love letter, the letter we all toil over, trying to find the right words that’ll woo the one we’re smitten over, how we ravage ourselves, throwing crumpled up pieces of paper, our hearts beating so fast at the thought of our gorgeous angel, making it difficult to even write one word–
Dear (insert lovely’s name),
How your eyes do theeeeeeeee someeethiiiiing….
Scratch that, crumple it up, start over. It doesn’t work! None of the words’ll work.
Yes, people, not even that cheesy love letter rivals that of the….
QUERY LETTER
And we shall cue the “Sound of Music” music, you know, that “hills have a pulse that beat to the sound of drums” music or something or other. I dunno. I never watched the freakin’ movie. Yes, query letters. Dear, God, query letters.
We have workshops on query letters these days, you know? It’s staggering. Everyone these days has the magic formula. I should say it’s the basic formula. You need a hook: check. After that, you have to outline the basic information: word count, genre, main character, premise, yadda yadda yadda: check, check. You have to write in something personal, something that’ll make it stand out (maybe you met said agent at a conference, or you know the agent’s grandmother and fed her chicken soup etc etc.): check, check, check. You tell a little bit about yourself that pertains to your endeavor to being published: quadruple check.
I could go on and on, but it won’t make a difference: I’m not trying to write a query letter training session here.
What I am going to say is exactly what I wrote up there (points a few paragraphs up). There’s the BASIC FORMULA. It’s all the information your agent/editor needs to understand what your project is about. That’s what’s important.
The variables are simple: query word count, structure, paragraphs, word choice. Things like that. It’s all up to you. It depends on your genre, too. It depends on your personality. Your style.
My current full request came about by a query letter I wrote of only four lines. Yes, you heard me–FOUR LINES. That’s it. And then there are other colleagues of mine that have interested agents birthed of page-long query letters, very detailed, thorough, remarkably articulate.
It’s all subjective. Some agents like a long letter–others like it short. Some like to be wowed by the unique. Others like it standard, simple. The crazy thing is there’s no way to be certain which agents really like what and how or especially when.
In the end, all that really does matter is your story. Your work. Is it a work this agent may be interested in devoting all that attention? It’s about faith. Someone had to have faith in Stephenie Meyer’s TWILIGHT. It wasn’t necessarily the query letter; it was the story.
Statistically, keeping that in mind, if you simply keep at it, there’s bound to be one agent out there that’ll read that polished query letter and will simply like it for the concept, the story, the character. What have you. Of course, it definitely helps that the query letter is polished…. But ultimately…it’s that novel, that story, that’ll hook them. Faith–it boils down to that.
So next time you’ve shelved that novel that never scored a hit to first base, remember to pull it back into the lineup, let it swing a few more times. Let it build up that muscle again. Give the literary market time to breathe, time to evolve, time to change. Then swing away.
Who knows. Your dusty novel might hit a home run one day.
Never really thought of it like that, very well said. So what your saying is, even someone like me can write a book and get published….
It’s a craft. You work and work and work, and the more you work, the better your work. So, essentially, YES, you could write a book and get published. You just have to keep writing until you either find an agent who’ll grab your current book or find an agent that’ll grab a previous book you’ve written years ago. Who knows. Persistence and hard work.