A Thought On Query Writing After Teaching One Class

Josh Getzler

Last night I began teaching my class in the Role of the Literary Agent at NYU. It’s an evening class, and after two and a half hours of talking and trying to be both illuminating and entertaining about the job I love doing…my throat hurts. It was interesting and fun, and I look forward to the next five classes to establish a rhythm and really get into the agent’s role in the life-cycle of a book.

After introducing the course and myself and finding out the makeup of the class, we went through a number of query letters—both strong and weak—discussing the characteristics of more and less successful queries.

And what we discovered by reading eight of them out loud, consecutively, is this: In almost every case, even in the good ones, the description of the plot was overlong. The student reading the query would read the first few sentences, stop, take a breath…and then there would be more. Characters would be named, secondary plot threads would be explored in detail, adjectives would fly. As we went through them, I started stopping the student at the point where the author should have ended.

Ultimately we realized this: A query letter is designed to make an agent want to read the first pages of the actual book. To accomplish this, the author really needs only to do the following:

1) Describe the genre and time period of the book (and be personally familiar enough with the agent to know that the genre and period are among those that the agent represents).

2) Say how long the book is, roughly (a nice, round, 75,000 words is just as good to us as 74,386).

3) Give a VERY short and pretty vague description of what the book is about (My 75,000 word contemporary young adult novel is about a spunky 17 year-old girl in LA who falls in love with the boy who plays bass in the hardcore punk band she’s auditioning for. When they are offered the chance to play in the Bumblecrumb festival the same week as final exams, her dreams of Harvard must fight it out with the chance to share the stage with Fugazi.)

4) Tell a bit about yourself, keeping in mind that all the agent cares about is relevant details: Experience as a florist—meh. Experience singing in hardcore punk bands while at Harvard—good. “This is my seventh novel, though I’m still waiting for my first publication”—Too much. “This is my first novel”—fine.

5) Then…get out of the way. We’re good. We want to read the first pages, and your writing will make the rest of the difference.

My students’ first assignment is to write query letters for famous books (Hunger Games, Murder on the Orient Express, The Fault in our Starts, and several more). I hope they remember that they need very little plot description, and that an A paper—or the path to publication!--can be much quicker than it would seem to be.