4 Questions To Ask Yourself Before You Query

Here are 4 questions to ask yourself if you want to strengthen your query letter before sending it out to literary agents.

Hello folks! Today, I’m going to share five questions you should ask yourself when you’re editing your query letter. These questions can help you strengthen your query letter and make sure you’re avoiding common mistakes in queries. Consider it a self-editing checklist. 

Q1: Are my competitive titles the best fit for my book and the market it fits into? 

Making sure that you’re choosing the right comps for your books is so important. Sometimes, I see folks choosing well-selling comps that compare to a specific aspect of their book. In a casual conversation, that’s perfectly acceptable. But in a query letter, that is ultimately not effective. 

If you’re pitching a sci-fi novel and you say something like, “My book will appeal to readers who enjoyed the complicated relationship in Sally Rooney’s NORMAL PEOPLE,” there’s something very wrong there. Even if it is true to some extent that the relationship dynamics in your book would remind readers of Sally Rooney’s, your SF book would ultimately be misplaced on a shelf next to Rooney’s. There are certain things that trump others when it comes to choosing the right comp title. One of these things is genre. If you’re pitching an SF novel and none of your comps are SF books, that’s a sign you’re not choosing the right comps. Why? Because there is a difference between editorial and sales comps. Sometimes the two overlap, and sometimes they don’t. Knowing the difference can help you choose the right comps. If you want to read more about the difference between editorial and sales comps, head to this blog post on comparative titles. 

Q2: Is all the information in my plot paragraph necessary? 

This one seems like it’s obvious, but it is an essential question to ask yourself again and again when you are editing your plot paragraph(s). You’ve only got so many words to play with in your query letter, so make sure every word and sentence is necessary. Keep in mind that your plot paragraph is meant to read almost like the copy on the back cover of a book, and not like a synopsis. 

Pay extra attention to this question if you’re writing SF or fantasy. Often, writers of these genres are compelled to give us some of the worldbuilding in a query letter. And guess what? We don’t need to know the details of the world in the query. What we do need to understand is who your character is and what is up against them. Don’t waste your word count on overexplaining your world. We need to be intrigued enough to want to read the book, but not all worldbuilding details are cause for intrigue. Consider the jacket copy for the hunger games series as an example: 

“In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. The Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the districts in line by forcing them all to send one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV.

“Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who lives alone with her mother and younger sister, regards it as a death sentence when she steps forward to take her sister's place in the Games. But Katniss has been close to dead before—and survival, for her, is second nature. Without really meaning to, she becomes a contender. But if she is to win, she will have to start making choices that weigh survival against humanity and life against love.”

Notice how parsed back the worldbuilding details are. We only know the information necessary to understand who Katniss is (a survivor), what is up against her (surviving the death sentence that is the Games), and the big dramatic question of the novel (will she be able to make these tough choices that ensure her survival while maintaining her humanity and love?). This doesn’t even mention which district Katniss is from or why the Games started. We don’t really need to know that in this pitch. 

I recommend reading the jacket copy of other sci-fi and fantasy novels to see how those were pitched to readers without overexplaining the world. 

Q3: Is it clear what’s at stake for my protagonist? 

Not only do we need to understand your character’s conflict, but we also need to know the stakes. Why is it hard for your character to get what they want? What makes the choices they have to make difficult? Often, that’s the crux of the story. That’s why readers are interested to know what happens next. Stakes create drama and tension. The stakes provide the answers to these two questions: “Why should we (the readers) care?” and “why should we keep on caring?” 

Q4: Have I thought about the ripple effect in my query letter and edited accordingly? 

A few weeks ago, I wrote about why causality matters in query letters.  I’m bringing this back here. Query letters are meant to speak for themselves. The downside of a query letter is that it’s not conversational. Unlike pitching at pitch events, the agent you’re pitching doesn’t get to ask you questions or give you the opportunity to clarify. We don’t get to say, “hold on, how did she get into the gang that got her involved in this high profile murder again?” You only get one opportunity to shine. The progression of events in your query letter, then, should be clearly communicated. And one way to do that is to reexamine whether you’ve got a ripple effect in your query letter. Causality – or the ripple effect– is how you create progression and momentum in your plot paragraph. Each of your sentences in your query letter needs to logically lead to the next, creating a clear chain of events. I recommend reading the full blog post on the ripple effect to really understand the value of this technique.