Query Letter Tips
This is a short video about query tips. Find the transcript below.
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TRANSCRIPT FOR QUERY LETTER TIPS
Hello. My name is Mary Kole with Good Story Company. I'm doing a little dance, a little slow dance today. This is a short video about query tips. Do we personalize our queries? Yes, we do, unless we have no personalization to include, in which case we do not say, "Because of your love of books I'm querying you," because that can be said for everybody and agents of all people know a form letter when they see it. What else? So you don't want to ascribe sort of adjectives to your own work like, "This amazing, hilarious, beautiful work of fiction." Of course, you think it's amazing and you should, you wrote it, but let them judge for themselves. Comp titles are comparative titles where you compare your work to something else, whether it's a book, whether it's a movie, it's Stranger Things meets Titanic, which I would actually watch.
So comp titles, don't do what I just did and cite two complete bestsellers, runaway hits. If you want to go high with a runaway hit bestseller, go low with something a little bit more quiet, a little bit more kind of within reach because if you say, "This is Harry Potter meets Twilight," which we would see all the time circa 2009 in children's publishing, when I first started having my own slush pile as an agent, we are going to think that your expectations are outsized compared to the market reality. That's a very nice and diplomatic way of saying, "We're going to think that you just are living on a different planet in terms of what actually happens in publishing because Harry Potter and Twilight come to mind so easily because they are such outliers." So if you do comp titles and you want to cite a bestseller, cite something else that's more within reach for the average human, or, even better yet, you can do two, you can do three books that are, you know, normal books that really resonate, whether it's tone, type of character, type of world, setting, anything else about the writing or the dialogue, you know, "This is John Green's dialogue meets Sarah Dessen's swoony romance," that sort of thing, you can also do for your comps. I would do no more than three though.
I have seen letters where we've had like six, seven comparative titles. The agent and publishers that's evaluating the query will start swimming. Keep your queries brief. And that includes at the sentence level because if I'm sitting down to chomp through 300 queries, I want to be able to scan the sentences, and overly detailed, overloaded 50-word sentences are not going to help me do that. They're going to give me an instant headache. Don't talk about subrights. Don't say, "You know, Tom Hanks would love to play this in the movie," unless you actually know Tom Hanks and you have Tom Hanks saying, "I would love to play this in the movie," in which case, make him do a video testimonial and upload the video. But don't put the cart before the horse. So you're querying a book agent or a book publisher, you want to talk about the book, talk about the book. Don't talk about merchandising rights, theme park rights, board book rights, film rights, foreign rights, all of those rights. Don't do it yet because, again, that conveys that you maybe have unrealistic expectations for how the process actually goes.
So, basically, one of the things that you're demonstrating other than, "I have a great story here," is, "I'm going to be reasonable and fun and easy to work with." And if you are, you know, the next J.K. Rowling and Tom Hanks is going to play it in a movie and it's hilarious and soul-touching and soul-crushing of a book, that comes across maybe a little bit of the wrong way. That hits a bit of a sour note when you're sort of presenting not only your project but yourself. And then finally, I would like to say as a quick query tip, do not send exclusive queries when they're not requested. There are some agents that say, "I only accept exclusive queries."
If you want to query that agent, then send them exclusively but do not extend an exclusive just because you like that agent, just because you hope to impress, just because you hope that it makes them pick you. It's just unnecessary because it costs you a lot of time. That person is going to be sitting on that query for two or three months and you will have lost potential time to query others. So unless there's a specific reason that you are querying somebody exclusively, query simultaneously. It's a business reality in today's publishing world. Send 10, 15 queries in batches at a time and give yourself the strongest chance to succeed and to make a good impression in the flesh. My name is Mary Kole. This is Good Story Company and here's to a good query.
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