Why I Write the Query Letter First
The hope of writing a commercially viable book
Before I get to the article, I have a quick announcement. Sign-ups for my Advanced Reader Copies are now open. If you’d like to check out my debut novel To Make Him Disappear before the release, fill out this Google Form, and I will send you a free eBook in exchange for an honest review.
Here is the opening paragraph of To Make Him Disappear:
The men at the table are disposable. Audrey would’ve preferred to have dinner alone with her daughter, yet the guest list grew to include Audrey’s ex-husband and a boy whose name she has already forgotten.
Now, to the writing tips.
First, what is a query letter?
It’s a marketing pitch that authors send to literary agents, hoping to get chosen for representation. A query letter has a three paragraph structure.
Metadata: Greetings, genre, title, word count, and a one-sentence pitch
Plot: A quick summary that elicits maximum curiosity while maintaining the balance between spoilers and vagueness
Bio: A bit about the author
The whole letter is between 300-400 words.
I’m writing my third novel. With each project, my approach to developing the initial concept has been very different.
Book 1
I was on a walk with my toddler and thought what would happen if I found an unattended baby? But wait, what if the baby was biologically tied to a woman who’s been missing for a long time?
Eventually, that became a dual POV, dual timeline story, written in both first and third person. It had a lot going on. When I learned what a query was and wrote my own, it took me months and many drafts. I posted it on r/Pubtips for critiques over and over. It got a very negative reception. That query only got one partial request out of 30 letters I sent.
Book 2
This book started as a paranormal mystery, drafted with no outline during NaNoWriMo. In that version, I wrote a side character who really spoke to me. I decided to keep the setting and the character, but change the whole story. That book became To Make Him Disappear.
Shockingly, the query for TMHD came together in just one day. Probably because I really understood the commercial appeal of the project. I got positive feedback on r/Pubtips right away. It still took many versions, but I knew the bones were good. This novel got 6 requests out of 100 letters. I was very happy with the progress.
Book 3
I brainstormed one sentence hooks and tested a few of them on my writing community.
This is what I sent them:
A high-school teacher determined to save an ex-student from her job as an Only Fans model becomes the primary suspect in the teen’s disappearance.
When a teacher gets engaged to a wealthy man, she realizes his parents might be responsible for a string of decade-old unsolved murders.
An eBay seller receives a return, but instead of shoes, the box contains a scrapbook of a woman who looks uncannily like her sister’s age-progressed-missing-person photo.
A photographer decides to bring awareness to her father’s decades-old murder by photographing the three alleys where he and two other men were killed within weeks of each other, but when she finds tiny messages scratched into the walls of each alley she visits, and then another man turns up dead, the artistic project becomes an active investigation.
An aspiring influencer accidentally reveals her home address to her followers, then a stalker capitalizes on her mistake.
I went with the one they liked and also the one that made me feel energized. Then, I thought of the plot in general strokes and wrote the query before starting on the story. r/Pubtips liked this one too and so did an agent who critiqued it during a class.
Overall, I feel like writing the query letter first, makes me focus on the elements of the story that elicit curiosity. While it’s hard to condense a full novel into a paragraph, it’s much easier to write a concise letter before all the details of the book take up space in my head and make it hard to know what to prioritize.
Next time you’re about to start a new project, I recommend writing the query or even a one-sentence pitch first. Share it with your writing community and edit it based on feedback.
Very good tip, Inga. Thank you!
Sometimes my stories come from a single sentence that pops into my head. It doesn't always work in the query letter. Then again, I've read so many advice articles on how to write the perfect query letter, many of them written by query agents that all contradict the other other (if they aren't contradicting themselves somewhere down the line). It didn't use to be hard for me to write the query letter, yet after years something shifted and it became one of the hardest things to create.
Synopsis still are the bane of my existence, but it was disheartening to suddenly feel like I can't come up with one. Maybe I needed the break.
Love the article.