How to Write the Perfect Query Letter

And a peek at the query that netted me four offers of representation

I used to work as an assistant for a very famous literary agent, and part of my job was reading slush. For those of you who don’t know, “slush” is a word used to describe the unsolicited queries that literary agents—and, occasionally, editors at publishing houses—receive from writers. I would take one day a week and dig through the queries we received from writers looking for representation.

Because of this agent’s reputation, he received thousands of queries. A day. And I was the one in the office in charge of reading them and passing them on to him if they seemed interesting. And I only had one day a week to do this—and that’s as long as I didn’t have any other pressing task that I needed to devote my attention to. As you can imagine, it was an enormous amount of work. I needed to come up with a system for determining whether or not a submission was worth this agent’s attention. And I needed to be able to do it fast.

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

If this story depresses you, don’t worry. The agent I worked for was an outlier, and most literary agents don’t see quite that number of submissions. Many literary agents read their own submissions very carefully and respond to writers looking for representation personally. But I like telling this anecdote, because it illustrates just how good your query needs to be. Even if you aren’t querying the agent I worked with, or someone just as famous or busy as he was, you need to act as if you are. You need to make sure that your query is so good that it catches the attention of an exhausted, overworked assistant who only has one day a week to get through 5,000+ emails.

So…. how do you do that?

Lucky for you, there is an exact formula that you should be using. I’ll walk you through it step by step, and I’ll even include examples from the query letter I used to get 4 offers of representation for my first adult novel.

Step one: Open your email by telling the agent what project you’re shopping and why you are reaching out to them. This should be three sentences, tops.

Here’s an example from my query letter: