I wanted to take a few minutes and comment on a few things I’ve been seeing in my query inbox lately. It should be obvious, but you want to hook an agent with your query, this is your chance to show us how awesome you are and what an amazing book you’ve written, so you want your query to be as strong as possible. If you can avoid some of the following mistakes, you make yourself look like a much more promising candidate for representation.
Don’t sell yourself short – I see this a lot with previously unpublished authors. You may not have any professional writing credits or even a job where you do much writing, but this doesn’t mean you don’t have talent or promise! I’ve been seeing “I’m only a…” or “I’m merely a…” Listen, I don’t want to know why I shouldn’t take you seriously, I want to know why I should take you seriously. Have you been reading everything you can and studying the conventions of your genre? Have you taken writing classes? Do you have three practice novels behind you? Accentuate the positive! Conversely, though:
Don’t oversell yourself – Obviously you think your book is in great shape, but if you tell me it is amazing and going to be a bestseller and a blockbuster movie, I may roll my eyes at you. You think it has movie potential? You’ve had favorable feedback at conferences? Sure, tell me that, but also be realistic.
Research, research, research – First, research the genre you’re writing. I’ve had at least a query a day for the last week where the manuscript is about half the length of typical novels in the genre, and I can’t even tell you how many are about 50% longer than they need to be (which probably means they still need serious editing). Also research the agent you are querying. My query guidelines specifically state that I do not represent YA, but invariably I get 10 or so queries a week for YA books. Why waste your time on me when you could be querying an amazing YA agent (which, coincidentally, we have a few of right here).
Proofread and edit – Make sure your project, particularly the pages you are sending in your query (and the query itself) are as tight and polished as can be. I’ve had queries tell me that they aren’t editors so “of course” there are mistakes. Polishing your work is part of writing, so if you aren’t good at catching grammatical errors and typos, at the very least ask someone to help you, particularly with those first 10 pages and the query email.
Check over your queries and see if you’re committing any of these mistakes and then happy querying and best of luck!
