Common mistakes in query letters: a primer
The top ten mistakes I see people making out there in query land.
Hello and Happy April!
May the sun rise to meet you and beam restorative Vitamin D onto your face and neck. This is the month I’m scheduled to have three major surgeries to my nasal passages—a turbinate reduction, a septoplasty and a nasal valve repair—so I feel a little stressed because I’m trying to frontload a lot of the work I have to do this spring into the tiny month of April as my post-op recovery period sounds like it will be pretty rough. (For those of you who are new here or missed a rather eye-opening visit I had with an Ear, Nose, Throat Doctor that I’d consulted about my chronic insomnia, that ENT post is here.)
A few housekeeping items before we move to this week’s post:
The first is a hivemind question about my cat. I have been struggling with my beloved cat Chester (he’s even in my memoir) for years now. He compulsively scratches the area around his face and eyes to the point of drawing blood. After treating him for allergies (which saw us doing everything from changing out our houseplants, deep cleaning the house and rugs, putting Chester on an allergy-free diet, and trying every shot and pill combo under the sun) we’ve detoxed him off his allergy meds and started treating him for possible anxiety, but the meds the vet suggested turned him into a zombie, and the inflatable donut they put around his head to protect his face made it 24 hours before he punctured it and ripped it off his head. I’ve been thinking of contacting an animal medium because I don’t know what else to do at this point (he’s bleeding on our sheets!), but you are all such good listeners and so good at giving advice, it occurred to me there might be someone out there who has experienced this with their feline, and might have advice? If you’re not a paid subscriber and you have some words of wisdom, you can send me a DM. Thanks! And wish us luck :(
Second thing: There’s one more month to apply to my October writer’s workshop in New Mexico called Turning Points! If you know someone who’d be right for Turning Points, you can send them here.
Many of you wrote after the Platform class to see if I could do a private brand audit (meaning a consultation about the way you present as a writer through your various social media). Thank you for your trust! I’m nearly fully booked, but in a happy coincidence,
over at Publishing Confidential is offering this same service—a digital audit—to all Founding Level subscribers to her Substack this April!Thank you for the Mother/Daughter book recos from last week! I’ve picked the winners for the giveaway and they’ve been notified. I have to make a compilation of all your incredible book recommendations— there are so many great titles there for people who like nuanced stories about complicated mother/daughter relationships. Just in time for Mother’s Day!
And finally, in light of today’s post about mistakes in query letters, remember that we have a 3-hour masterclass coming up about all things querying on April 17th. This will be the Holy Grail of querying classes, covering why we query, how to query, how not to query, what to do if you only get rejections and a hell of a lot more. We’ll be workshopping actual query letters from subscribers (more on that, Friday.) If you’d like to join us, please do! You can sign up for the query class using this link. (Video is available for two weeks after class if you can’t join us live.) And remember, paying subscribers to my Substack get a discount on my classes. That discount code is after the paywall in this post!
Without further ado, let’s get to today’s post about mistakes I see in queries.
In lectures and podcasts, I’ve shared the biggest single mistake I made when querying for my first agent, which I’ll share with you, here. When I queried for my first novel, I was a twenty-something based in Paris, employed as a salesperson for Corona Extra (the light beer, not the virus). I didn’t have to start my job (which consisted of driving around Paris in a Coronamobile and throwing Corona parties where no French people actually wanted to consume Corona because they didn’t consider it a beer) until 5pm, so I had a lot of time to write. A story I had started was getting so long, it looked like I had a novel on my hands, so a novel is what I continued to write. Now, I don’t have an MFA and I didn’t study English in college or take creative writing workshops, so the world of MFAs and conferences and agents (which is nearly everything I think about, now) was the furthest thing from my mind, then. At that point in my twenties, I didn’t have a single friend who was a writer. In fact, having moved to Paris as an expat, I didn’t have a ton of friends at all. I’d written something that I was proud of and that I thought read well, and from what I was learning on the newborn Internet, querying agents was what you did when you had a finished book.
So I started writing everyone and anyone I thought might like my novel. I wrote Susan Golomb because I loved Jonathan Franzen. And I wrote Binky Urban, who represented both Donna Tartt and Brett Easton Ellis, because I admired the writing of them both. In my email to Binky Urban, I used the subject line: “This book will change your life.” Well. Binky Urban, one of the world’s most powerful agents back then, wrote back pretty quickly, “I don’t know if this book will change my life, but this subject line certainly did.”
I cleaned up my subject lines from there on out and tried to check my ego. This was in 2003, so I’ve learned a lot since then from my failures and my successes with various agents (I’m on my third and I’m not budging), and I’ve also learned heaps about querying different genres from the writers who have generously worked with me on their own query packages. The advice that I’ll be sharing here is largely thanks to them.1
So let’s get to it! Here are the top ten mistakes that I see writers making in their query letters.