Everything a query letter should contain in 2025
Part 1 of a January intensive on querying at Before and After the Book Deal
Hello and Happy January!
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That’s pretty much it for housekeeping! Let’s get to the Q-word.
Given that it’s a new year and many of you will be reading this with renewed inspiration and energy to tackle writing goals, I thought we might spend most of January talking about querying1. I don’t always break months out into themes, but this January, I want to. Here’s how it will go:
This week we’ll explore components of a competitive query letter in 2025.
Next week, I’ll compile a list of do’s and don’ts regarding querying that go beyond the letter itself to general etiquette.
Week three, I’ll do a Friday office hours where paid subscribers can write in with query-writing related questions. If you want to participate in that Q&A, you can upgrade with this button.
If I think it’s helpful or necessary, I’ll compile a round-up of the most popular questions or confusion points with my opinions and answers.
And then we’ll move on to other topics! If you aren’t in the querying trenches, don’t worry— I’ll share other content this January as well.
By the way, if you are REALLY in the thick of it with querying and submissions, you might enjoy these online masterclasses I offer to illuminate why writers aren’t getting the “yes”s that they want:
Query Writing 2.0: How to get an agent in a competitive market
Hook them from Page One: Why your opening pages are important and how to get them right
These can be signed up for directly through my website and I’ll email the video and supporting materials once I receive your registration. Some of these classes are discounted for the new year that we’re in.
What does a query letter need to contain in 2025?
A query letter is an author’s attempt to pitch their current project (generally a novel, memoir, memoir-in-essays, short story collection, anthology, graphic novel or graphic memoir, or book proposal) and themselves to a literary agent who will (if they choose to represent the author) aim to sell the project to an editor.
These days, query letters are nearly exclusively sent via email. (I’m old enough that I sent query letters via post when I was starting out and received responses in actual envelopes! Pretty crazy, huh?)
Query letters are meant to be succinct distillations of:
Your book and its genre, subject matter, plot and saleability (meaning, why would total strangers want to buy this book?).
Your ability to be a team player on a publishing team and an ambassador for your book.
Your writing experience.
To that end, query letters should be concise. Four to five paragraphs max.
Most people think the goal of a query letter is to win the author a book deal. But that’s not right. That’s the end goal; that’s the dream! But the purpose of a query letter is to seduce the agent into asking to read pages. That’s it. That’s the most a query letter can do—get the agent to ask for chapters or the entire manuscript. After that, the onus falls to your manuscript (and platform, I’m afraid) to complete the wooing.
Query letters can be written in a variety of tones and generally should be similar to the energy of the manuscript. I have a three-hour class that teaches you how to write a query letter, but a useful formula for query writing is this:
Who needs to accomplish what by when, where, and why? (And why am I the person to write it?)
I don’t care if you are writing a cookbook or a memoir or a memoir that’s a cookbook,2 a literary novel or a commercial one, if you can’t apply this formula to your project, it’s often because your project has no stakes, timelieness, or plot. You need one of these three things to get past the red rope of publishing. Life will be easier for you if you have all three, but you can get by with one.
Once you have the answer to the above formula, there are certain components that need to be in your query. They don’t need to appear in the order I’m presenting them, but they do need to appear.
Here are the components I think all query letters should have in 2025, regardless of genre: