Query Letter - Part 2
Focus on the Greeting, Personalization, Pitch and Hook
A query letter should include these sections.
A Greeting
A Pitch
A Story Hook
A Book Description (aka blurb)
A Comp Title section
A bit of personalization demonstrating how or why you chose the agent
A Close
In my query letters, whenever possible, I chose to combine the greeting and personalization, and open my letter with it, a trick that is the preference of many agents. In a handful of cases, I tucked the personalization down low, below my author bio. In one case, it became a postscript. But those were rare exceptions to the majority.
Any words or sentences that would later be customized, I formatted in green, both as a reminder to make the necessary changes, and to speed up editing. The body of the letter in black type, identical in every letter, didn’t require a final review. Thus, I could quickly review green areas for any typos or punctuation that needed correction. Fictional example of combined personalization and greeting:
Dear Ms. Cross,
I was in attendance at the East Anglia Writers Conference where you said your dream manuscript would “highlight a female character committed to science.” Allow me to introduce you to Dr Marie Smithson.
This is followed by the Pitch. The Pitch is a short sentence or two that includes just the facts (or data) related to your book: its title, genre, and word count.
Fictional example:
Please consider my lighthearted novel, LAB LIFE, an adult romantic-mystery in which Marie Smithson solves the mystery of a new pathogen that has deadly consequences for blue-eyed men. The first-person account is narrated by Marie herself, and is 88,000 words.
The Story Hook appears near the top of the query letter. It might be the one sentence that keeps the agent reading—or not. It, and the story description, should together comprise half of the one-page letter. Ideally, these two sections will total fewer than 230 words.
My original hook was too vague. I re-wrote it over and over again, narrowing dozens of choices to six, each varying from 50-100 words. They still felt too long, and none jumped out as The One. That suggested that none were good enough. I returned to YouTube for advice and learned that a hook should be no more than 75 words and should consist of as few sentences as humanly possible. And that there are different types of hooks, for different types of books! It really helped to see good examples.
I decided to include my book's intriguing concept and to raise a question in the mind of the reader. Thirty-five words later, I wrote a Hook that pleased me. But it took days of effort!
But nothing like the effort required to write the one paragraph that describes my novel. More on the book description, and comp titles, in Part III.