Last week I wrote about query letters, a topic near and dear to every writer’s heart… and often a source of much anxiety. Monday’s post was about the preparation, Thursday’s was on the actual components of a query, and today I’ll follow up with the little details.
Because queries are such a source of anxiety, people tend to overanalyze the guidelines and read too far between the lines. You’re sending something very important out into the ether, getting little to no feedback on it, and it’s hard to know what you’ve done right and where you might have gone wrong.
As I’ve said before, common sense will usually rule the day. Keep a pleasant, professional tone, include all the important things, and you’ll be fine. The gray areas are where people tend to get stuck; the optional things that you hear about but aren’t sure if you should do.
Remember that this is just one editor’s opinion. I don’t speak for every editor, publisher or agent out there. But maybe one editor’s opinion, explained plainly, will help to give you a sense of the editor/agent perspective.
Don’t try to impress me.
You’ll have heard this one before, I’m sure. Lots of people give this advice, but very few of them tell you what it means.
Notice that I said “Don’t try to impress me,” not “Don’t impress me.” There’s a big difference there. Of course I want to be impressed. We all want to be impressed. The key is that we want to be impressed by your story. We won’t be impressed by anything else.
What this doesn’t mean: Write a bland pitch and a synopsis that’s just a clinical outline of events.
What it does mean: Write an exciting, vibrant pitch and synopsis, but don’t include any gimmicks with it.
Please don’t:
• treat your query like a sixth-grade book report — don’t dress up as your main character (by querying from a fictional first-person POV). Don’t use fancy dialect or otherwise “act” your query. Let your story speak for itself. You can make it plenty interesting without dressing it up in fancy clothes.
• use visual formatting effects to stand out: perfumed pink paper or glittery effects or ornate fonts. All it does is make a query difficult (or in some cases, painful) to read.
• go out of your way to format at all. All that work is going to go away when the publisher does their own layout, anyway.
• include gifts. If someone doesn’t like your manuscript, a bribe won’t change their mind. It doesn’t matter whether it’s creepy, expensive, or matched to the theme of your manuscript.
• make threats, even veiled or playful ones, about what will happen to us, our family, or the fate of civilization if we don’t accept your manuscript.
• submit to a personal address instead of the official submissions address, thinking it’s a shortcut or it’ll get you more attention. We have official channels for a reason. Going outside them is a great way to fall unlabeled through the cracks, or to creep someone out and make a bad impression.
• overhype. If you try to set our expectations too high, you have nowhere to go but down. Don’t tell us what a blockbuster hit the movie version will be, or how many awards it will win. Don’t tell us we’ll need to do a 100,000 print run.
• tell us who would play your main characters in the movie. Seriously, don’t. First, because I think it’s cheating. I think it’s seeding your reader’s imagination with a preconceived picture, and it is often used to cover for the fact that the characters aren’t fleshed out well enough in the writing to create that picture on their own. Second, because it makes it sound as though you’re already thinking toward film instead of concentrating on your print product… you know, the one you’re trying to sell me on. I’m not buying a movie, and I’m especially not buying a movie that relies upon a very specific Hollywood A-list cast that you’re probably extremely unlikely to get. Bonus “no” points for posthumous casting.
Contested Territory
Opinion varies on whether you should compare your writing to other authors’ styles in your query. Personally, I’m against it. This is your time to show us your voice and how you’re unique, not how you’re the same as someone else. There’s a place for that sort of comparison and it’s very effective when used properly… but in my opinion, that place is on the book cover and the marketing promo, not in the query.
Opinion also varies on the use of rhetorical questions in a pitch or synopsis. Personally, I’m completely neutral on the matter, but I know that there are agents and editors who hate them. In fact, there are enough agents and editors who hate them that you’re probably safer avoiding them.
Others don’t mind it, but personally, I don’t like to see the sentence that starts with, “My manuscript would be a good fit for you because…” In my perspective, if you tell me the genre and the wordcount and give me your brief pitch, I’ll know whether your manuscript fits my needs or not.
Low-maintenance isn’t the same as boring!
You want to come across as low-maintenance, adaptable and easy to work with. Showing that you’ve read the guidelines and formatted your submission in accordance is a large part of that. Taking a sane tone of voice is another. The less you say, sometimes, the more sane and easygoing you will appear.
The query letter isn’t the place to make demands about contract terms. Hook someone on your writing and you’ll be in a much stronger position to negotiate. Don’t come off as high-maintenance, pushy and demanding before you’ve even said hello.
It also isn’t the place to show paranoia or distrust for the publishing process. A paranoid author who password-locks a submitted file or insists on only sending it hardcopy and registered, or otherwise expresses concern over it potentially falling into the wrong hands or being used for unscrupulous purposes, is very unlikely to be offered a book deal. Publishing is a profession and publishers are professionals. If you can’t trust us to look at your work without stealing it, you’re not going to get very far. Honestly, most of what we see isn’t worth keeping. The work that is worth keeping, doesn’t get stolen. It gets signed.
Control Freaks Beware
There is a certain amount of editorial control that you give up when you sign with a publisher. The formatting and layout will be up to the person whose job it is to do those things. You probably won’t have a say in much of any of that, down to what font they use and what they use to separate the chapter breaks. It’s best to be accepting of that up front, or at least to seem accepting of that.
Down the road, maybe you can make suggestions or requests. They may be considered and incorporated. They may be considered and then later discarded. Either way, the query is not the time. The more conditions you place on your work right out of the gate, the more you come across as difficult to work with. When you query, all that matters is the text. Sell us on your story. The rest comes later.
The art question
Speaking of editorial control, I’m often asked whether art should be submitted with a query. The answer to that is a resounding no. To put it in perspective for you, even authors who write childrens’ picture books don’t usually collaborate with an artist. They write the script, and an artist is paired with them later to illustrate the words.
When you’re working with a large publisher, they will have an art director and an art department in-house. These are people who specialize in knowing what sort of art makes a good cover image and sells a book. You might be able to make a recommendation to them, but providing your own art up front or insisting on working with a particular artist will probably work against you. Even if the art is good, it may not be the sort of thing that works well on a book cover. If the art isn’t so good, it may color perception of the quality of your manuscript. Again, there’s no harm in trying to suggest or request a particular artist at the appropriate point in the process, but the query isn’t the time or place.
Don’t get impatient with the process
Publishing always seems glacially slow from the outside, and I can sympathize that the time from when you send off your baby to when you hear back from someone can feel endless. Publishers are busy, busy people, and it’s an industry that requires a lot of lead time to get a book ready for print. You have to realize and accept that you’re just one tree in a publisher’s large forest. You will be tended to, but in their time, when your slot comes up and your priority rises to the top.
From a personal perspective, if I’m doing thorough edits on a 300-page book, and industry standard pace is 5-10pgs/hour, and it’s not my only project, that’s going to take some time. If you don’t hear from me, it doesn’t mean I’m not working. It probably means I am.
How long before you can send a followup? Check the submissions guidelines for a publisher. They’ll often tell you how long they take to respond. Give them another [unit] or two beyond that. If they say three days, give them four or five before you email politely. If they say weeks, or months, likewise. Things come up, emergencies happen, and keeping the books on schedule that are already slotted for production is a higher priority than going through the ones that aren’t signed yet.
Be polite in your query, not demanding or passive-aggressive. There’s no way someone can answer “Have you looked at it yet?” to tell you what you want to hear. If they’d looked at it yet, they’d have told you. Compare:
“I’m writing to follow up on my manuscript, [title], which I sent to you on [date]. It was a pleasure to meet you at [some conference]. Thank you again for accepting my query and I look forward to your response.”
That’s about as non-aggressive and pleasant as you can get. It doesn’t ask someone if they’ve read it, when they’ll read it, or when they can expect to hear back, it just politely reminds them that they have it and how long they’ve had it. It doesn’t get passive-aggressive and say “I know you’re really busy and you probably haven’t had time and I’m really sorry to bother you…”, it’s just straightforward, pleasant, and non-demanding.
When you do get signed, by the way, that glacial pace doesn’t change. You’ll feel like it’s taking ages to get edits back, or to get a cover back from the art director, or that your book is in the can for six months doing nothing while it waits for its slot in the production schedule. Well… it will be. These people are juggling a lot of books and they’ll get to each stage of yours when each stage comes due. Get used to it, relax, and spend that time writing your next masterpiece.
