Crafting the Successful Query Letter

How to Write a Successful Query Letter

VIDEO DESCRIPTION

Author/editor Marla Miller troubleshoots a problematic query letter at the Southern California Writers Conference.

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How to Write a Successful Query Letter Query Letter agents books fiction nonfiction published publishing writers writingHow to Write a Successful Query Letter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Marla Miller: Now people go into writing groups to get their pages critiqued, get their chapters critiqued. What they don’t do is get the first product that’s going to be representing them.

Participant: We’re talking about the query letter, right?

Marla Miller: We’re talking about the query letter but you didn’t get a sense that there would be any romance here. So this writer is one wondering in chicklet genre, is the presence of a love interest, important into our mandatory because you didn’t hear any men on the page. What’s his story about? Give me a sentence. You don’t know, do you? Do we know this author has a funny voice?

Participant: Yeah.

Marla Miller: Okay. Do we believe that this author probably is really familiar with this tapestry? Okay, we believe that. So, do we think twice to ourselves she probably could execute this kind of story line if we knew what the story line was? How many of you wondered why dogs are dying? And how many of you -- why didn’t you raise your hand and say, “What about the dogs dying?”

Participant: What about the dogs dying?

Marla Miller: Okay, what about that?

Alana: What -- it’s hard for me, I’m struggling with genres and for me, for this, I don’t necessarily know if its chicklet. It has a fun, funny breezy top layer but I think it covers a lot of issues, like I think its kind of a postmortem on what’s happening in our country in the last ten years. Like what it is, is this naïve girl that seeing things are happening in the corporate world that she can understand it. She doesn’t know how to deal with it. She kinds of get into trouble because of her being naïve and her own values just don’t fit anymore.

I was in the beauty industry now I’m working with dog food with these people and what happens is that it sorts of -- she falls into these traps where she finds things that are cracked or wrong and one of them is that the pet food is tainted. Well, that was a --

Marla Miller: Could we know that?

Participant: Yes.

Alana: That was a story but that did happen in the news so it’s kind of based upon that that what did this girl do when she finds it and what happens in our culture when someone is the whistleblower. What happens when someone is the person who stands out -- and this girl who everyone sees a certain way has to deal with all these issues --

Marla Miller: Okay. I’m going to stop you

Participant: I was hoping she was killing the dog.

Marla Miller: Yeah. I’m going to stop her because what has Alana told us now -- did we know that. Now, you know this -- I always get at least one or two of these queries from an author who has spent enormous time writing a book that she obviously has passion about because we heard it, didn’t we? Didn’t we just hear it?

Participant: Yeah.

Marla Miller: Did we hear any of her passion on the page.

Participant: No.

Marla Miller: Did she say that she’s not sure about the genre.

Participant: Yeah.

Marla Miller: And do we see that on the page that she’s not sure about the genre?

Participant: Yes.

Marla Miller: Does this author have some work to do.

Participant: Yes.

Marla Miller: I encourage people to really -- your query letters. If you’ve got a story that has generated the kind of emotion that she just shared wit us, you know, about being -- kind if dismissed because she’s just a girl. You know, this girl in the beauty industry, if we heard that this girl was trying to plug in to that her life was mirroring, what was going on in the bigger world, would that had been closer to the story that she’s trying to tell. So that if you got 20 rejection letters, I’m not surprise because what’s on that page is almost a cliché.

First of all, chicklet is just -- it saturated the market. That trend hit two years ago and it’s on the down swing. So an agent, even if an agent was interested in chicklet had represented it, agents know that they're not selling. That their hay day is gone, they're on the downswing. Now, it’ll come back up because that’s the business. It’s like real estate, up and down and up and down. But its down now because the girl is -- primarily, young women your age are not buying like they used to.

So, if this is a story that is heartfelt from this author who wants to explore a social political issue, right? Because that’s what you wanted to and is that what your book does?

Participant: That’s what the book does but that’s not what the query letter --

Marla Miller: Right, so, now she has got her homework, doesn’t she?

Alana: Thank you.

Marla Miller: And so probably, when she gets that query letter nice and tight, and when its truly representative of what her story is about, she might get more attention. Because what this is, is a red herring. This doesn’t tell -- this says something that it isn’t. It says, it’s going to be about this but it isn’t. And it’s very common for writers to do this because we write to write books. We don’t learn to write query letters. But you have got to write them. You have got to know how write one of them.