Hello! I read your last post about traditional publishing, and was wondering if you’d be able to speak more on revising your queries? I’ve been querying various manuscripts since 2016 and never once have I gotten any personal feedback- about the query or the manuscript. When the only responses are form responses (which I do understand- agents are overwhelmed with queries) how do you then go about revising a query letter you’ve already done your best with? Any advice would be much appreciated! Thanks for helping out us hopefuls.
Great news! I'm procrastinating!
So, listen. I love queries. It took me a long time to love the art of writing one but now I'm so extremely up my own ass about it I'm a human Möbius strip.
First and foremost, gonna drop the link to Query Shark again. Janet Reid was a pretty legendary agent, and on this blog, she specifically calls out what works and what doesn't and WHY. To your purpose: some of the entries are on queries that have been critiqued, revised, and resubmitted.
Second: Query letters and jacket copy (the summary on the dustcover or back cover) have largely the same anatomy, in genre fiction. Outside of genre fiction, they let you get away with shit like "five friends reunite on the Alaskan coast after ten years and relive their journeys through heartbreak, addiction, illness, grief, and one of them sets fires."
The bones of a genre fiction query, on the other hand, are:
Introduce protagonist and their status quo
Explain the problem they will face in the book, and the consequences of failure to overcome it (aka conflict and stakes)
IDEALLY: incorporate a hook.
You can usually structure this as "Meet [Protagonist.] Protagonist must [do objective], or [consequences of failure] happens. HOWEVER. [Optional hook - we'll get into this below.]"
However, this is deceptively simple, so let's go through each point.
PROTAGONIST INTRODUCTION
Let's just get this out of the way. If you have multiple protags/POVs you're going to have to pick one to take the lead. Look at how dual-POV romance books structure their copy—it's usually something like "POV 1 is a fabulously wealthy scoundrel who has a problem for the first time in their life. [Abridged summary of problem.] POV 2 is a straight-laced, emotionally repressed bookworm who would never be caught dead with POV 1... if not for [problem that perfectly compliments POV 1's problem.]" The first introduction contextualizes the second.
Moving on! The point of the introduction isn't just to tell us who your protag is, it's to tell us why they are the conduit for this story. The real trick is doing this in a way that also communicates something about the setting and their status quo.
I'm going to use examples from my books to illustrate this. First, with The Merciful Crow:
As a chief-in-training of the Crow caste, sixteen-year-old Fie abides by one rule: look after your own. Her caste of undertakers and mercy-killers takes more abuse than coin from the gentry, but when her family is called to collect royal dead, she’s hoping they’ll find the payout of a lifetime.
We get Fie's ethos. Then the next sentence establishes why that matters while also positioning her place in the larger world, and ends with what she's seeking: money to protect her family.
By contrast, Vanja's introduction for Little Thieves is significantly longer:
Vanja Schmidt knows that no gift is freely given, not even a mother’s love―and she’s on the hook for one hell of a debt. Vanja, the adopted goddaughter of Death and Fortune, was Princess Gisele's dutiful servant up until a year ago. That was when Vanja’s otherworldly mothers demanded a terrible price for their care, and Vanja decided to steal her future back… by stealing Gisele’s life for herself. The real Gisele is left a penniless nobody while Vanja uses an enchanted string of pearls to take her place. Now, Vanja leads a lonely but lucrative double life as princess and jewel thief, charming nobility while emptying their coffers to fund her great escape.
We get Vanja's ethos, but also an immediate open-ended mystery: what is this debt? The next sentence hints at the answer while illustrating the fantastical nature of the world and Vanja's place in it. The third sentence pushes us to sympathize with Vanja... but then presents a highly questionable act as her solution. Then the next paragraph lays out the consequences: Things are going (mostly) great for Vanja, but she's very alone.
Normally I'd cut this down and let you get this backstory in the book, but the key is, the penny drops (wink wink for anyone who's read LT) in the next sentence:
Then, one heist away from freedom, Vanja crosses the wrong god and is cursed to an untimely end: turning into jewels, stone by stone, for her greed.
Which brings us to bullet point 2:
CONFLICT AND STAKES
So now we know what the book is really about: Vanja's misdeeds have led her into a poetic curse that she has to break (conflict) or lose her life (stakes.) Everything that came before gives those weight. We have the surface level explanation of why she's been stealing instead of just cavorting around as a princess, why she has to solve this alone, why the god would choose turning to jewels as a punishment. We care about her losing her life because it sounds like she made a bad choice to get out of a bad situation!
By contrast, this section in The Merciful Crow's original query is much longer:
Instead, they find a still-living crown prince, his too-cunning bodyguard, and a common foe. To seize the throne, the murderous new queen has allied herself with the same violent faction that has terrorized the Crows for generations. The prince has never lifted a finger to stop them; the guard has never drawn a blade to protect a Crow – and now they expect the Crows’ help. They don’t expect Fie to name a price: she will smuggle the prince across the nation to his own allies before the queen hunts him down. She won’t even smother him in his sleep for ignoring her caste’s persecution. And in return, he will guarantee the Crows’ safety once he wears the crown.
This lays out bigger world-level conflict and stakes as opposed to LT's more personal stakes; it also provides a preview of the prickly character dynamics to come. Which is important when we get to....
THE HOOK
The hook is the special sauce. It's the oomph. It's the sentence you read in the summary and decide that book is going home with you. It's not necessarily a twist, but it's something that scratches your brain and makes you want to dive in.
In the TMC query, it's the last paragraph:
If Fie can keep the deal, she’ll bring an end to her people’s hardship. But with the queen’s brutal hunters on their trail, every step puts her family in greater danger, forcing Fie into the bloody truth of what it means to be a chief – and the sacrifices it takes to truly look after her own.
This takes the big world stakes and makes them personal and immediate. It's not "will she honor her creed of looking after her own" but rather "what does that look like when the promise of massive societal change comes at the expense of your immediate family."
In LT, the stakes are already very personal, so the hook is already in elements like her being the daughter of Death and Fortune, the hint of her 'stealing her life back' but winding up lonely, stuff that suggests inner conflicts. The last paragraph instead gives a hook-y deadline, and an addition of factors that will further complicate Vanja's efforts to save herself:
Vanja has just two weeks to figure out how to break her curse and make her getaway. And with a feral guardian half-god, Gisele’s sinister fiancé, and an overeager junior detective on Vanja’s tail, she’ll have to pull the biggest grift yet to save her own life.
Things like Gisele's sinister fiancé and the overeager junior detective are further communicating a sense of pursuit and danger, ramping up the stakes and the hint of shenanigans needed to evade them.
Here's some examples of hooks you could throw on fairytales, as an illustration:
Little Red Riding hood, but Little Red opens the door to her grandma's house for the wolf
Sleeping Beauty, but the briars are actively spreading every year Aurora is asleep—but when she's awoken early, the thorns grow faster
Snow White eats the poison apple on purpose, and the prince has to figure out why before he can break through the glass coffin—if he even should.
This is all quite long, but here's some bits of advice to wrap it up:
Truly read through the Query Shark archives
Look at if your query has the basic elements of "Introduce protagonist, say what they want to do, say what's in their way, say what happens if they fail, ideally throw in flavor about the price of success."
Read the jacket copy for your favorite books, and/or books that are similar to yours. (If you think no book is similar to yours, read more widely, haha, because also: comp titles! Oh god I need to talk about comp titles.)
COMP TITLES
I was about to wrap this up but this needs to be a separate point. Comp titles are the part in your query where you say "my manuscript is [title] meets [title.]" Three big suggestions here:
One of those titles needs to be something published in your desired genre and age category within the last three years. You need to show you are actively reading in this genre.
Avoid major properties. Game of Thrones? Nope. Star Wars? Forget it. Hunger Games, Harry Potter, Twilight, Divergent, Throne of Glass, Six of Crows, Squid Games, everyone is using those comps and it becomes meaningless. Also used to be common wisdom to stick strictly to books, BUT...
The best thing you can do, and the exception to no. 2 in its entirety, is calling out a specific trait/element your manuscript has in common with a comp title. So let's say I'm writing a humorous adult fantasy about uhhhhh a young stern political activist lobbying for a new categorization of magic to be recognized by Magic Parliament. I'd comp it as "A prickly-but-principled heroine like Emily Wilde navigating the very human politics of a fantastical West Wing." Or hell, let's take two of our big name properties: "Game of Thrones meets Twilight" tells us nothing. "Twilight's all-consuming romance meets the deadly, high-stakes political machinations of Game of Thrones" is cooking with gas.
I think that's mostly everything. It's almost midnight. If anyone else asks me publishing questions I will probably procrastinate more tomorrow, in which case, you're going to have to tell my agent why this book is late!
