Literary agents and publishers receive hundreds of queries per week. How can I make mine stand out?
Your query letter will be the first example of your writing that literary agents and publishers will see. If you can’t draft a well-organized and well-written query letter, they’ll assume you can’t write a marketable novel. It’s important that the query letter be contained on one page. Even if they don’t know you, a busy agent and senior editor will be willing to read one page, as long as it’s comfortable reading. (By “comfortable” I mean easy to read. Some writers, knowing that the query letter should be only one page, accomplish that by printing it in a typeface so small the agent or publisher will need a magnifying glass to read it.) Get across the essence of your story in one or two paragraphs. Let the agent or publisher know what kind of book it is (mainstream, suspense, romance, etc.) and how long it is (word count, not number of pages). The primary goal of the query letter is to convince the agent or editor to take a few more minutes out of his or her busy schedule to read the s
