The Query Letter that Got Me an Agent
Using marketing to hack the query letter trenches
The First Sister was not the first book I found myself in the query trenches with. It wasn’t even my second. But it was the first that had an overwhelming amount of responses and landed me my eventual agent.
It was also the first query letter I wrote while taking everything I’d learned in my more than a decade of marketing experience into account.
I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
Here’s the query letter copied and pasted from the email that got me my agent. Afterwards, I’ll break it down piece by piece to show you the tricks.
Dear Alexandra,
Curiosity. Yearning. Enthusiasm. Love. Can those trapped in an endless war choose between the needs of their people over their emotions?
First Sister is a nameless, voiceless courtesan and priestess of the Sisterhood, traveling the stars alongside the soldiers who own the rights to her body and soul. But when the Mother, the leader of the Sisterhood, assigns First Sister to go against everything she has been taught and spy on her new captain, the beautiful Saito Ren, First Sister discovers that sacrificing for the war is so much harder when in love.
Lito val Lucius, an elite soldier of the Mercury and Venus alliance, is haunted by his part in losing Ceres to Earth and Mars. But when he is assigned to hunt down his former partner, Hiro val Akira, he must decide what he is actually fighting for--the sibling he loves, the society that raised him, or himself.
As each draws closer to completing their mission, their paths converge on a single point where their decisions will change the tide of the war--if they can put aside their own desires first.
THE FIRST SISTER, complete at 78,800 words, is Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale meets Pierce Brown’s Red Rising. This #ownvoices story is a standalone novel with series potential. I am querying you because of your work with diverse authors and passion for YA. I attended the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2016 and was published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies Issue #215. I hope you enjoy.
Sincerely,
Linden A. Lewis
Priming Keywords
The first thing I want you to pay attention to is that first paragraph. Jumping in with a bunch of nouns seems kind of nonsensical, I know, but bear with me.
There’s this thing known as the priming effect, a psychological and subconscious response to stimuli that influences our conscious reaction to stimuli. To put it simply, in marketing, this is used in ads to snag attention and convert viewers into buyers, among other things.
An example is just about every perfume ad in the world. They’re trying to sell you something that smells through a screen, which, until they invent smellovision, is going to be difficult. So instead they focus on the vibes and prime you with a combination of images and words.
They’ll say things like FREE or INDIVIDUAL or ELEGANT, and that primes the viewer to then associate those words with that product. If you want to feel elegant, you might end up buying that fragrance.
When you think Coca Cola, you think REFRESHING. When you think Red Bull, you think SPEED. Why? Because they’ve spent billions to make you associate those things.
Back to the query letter. In an experiment, I selected five agents to send this version of the query letter to with the priming keywords front and center. These were words that could apply to my book, sure, but they were chosen specifically because I wanted the person reading the query letter to feel those things as they continued to read.
Let’s look at those words again: Curiosity. Yearning. Enthusiasm. Love.
I wanted the person reading the letter to feel curiosity about the book, to yearn for the book, to be enthusiastic about the book, to love the book (and want to represent me). So I primed them into it.
Question Hook
Honestly, the question that follows the priming keywords was written as an “excuse” to have the keywords there, but I made sure it had a hook to it so it wasn’t wasting space. I was thinking blockbuster movie ads when I wrote it.
It also sets up the world we’re about to dive into: there’s an “endless war”; there are people “trapped” in it; they’re unable to meet their emotional needs if they wish to remain loyal to their people, so there’s conflict there.
And since the reader has been primed to be curious with the priming keywords, they’re probably wondering who these people are.
Which brings you to…
Who are these guys?
I always start with the basics: who, what, when, where, and why. I literally write them down like that.
So, for example, this query letter had:
Who: The First Sister
What: A comfort woman who can’t talk
When: She’s tasked to spy on her captain
Where: The spaceship she lives on
Why: The assignment goes against her training
Then I focus on two additional things:
The problem: Connected to “when” and “why” in this case. Our priestess is in love with the person she’s supposed to be spying on, oh and by the way, it goes against all the rules that’ve been beaten into her. This sums up the plot.
The worldbuilding: Connected to “what” and “where” in this case. Describing her as nameless and voiceless, referring to the greater priestess organization, mentioning her superior is involved. Quite literally build an image of the world that is in the book.
I wrote the basic outline for both First Sister’s and Lito’s paragraphs, then played with various adjectives and sentence structure until I felt it accurately reflected the worldbuilding.
I put one paragraph directly after the other to contrast the two and place them on either side of the war. Then I finished with a paragraph that united the two of them: they both have a mission, they both can change the war, they both care about something.
And I did that because our reader (because the agent is, indeed, our reader at this moment) needs to care about our characters.
Characters that readers care about
There are several ways to get readers to care about the characters, but the trick is doing it in a short space like a query letter.
Here are three quick and dirty ways of doing it:
Readers care about characters who care about something: A family member, a lover, a friend, a mission, a pet, a childhood stuffed animal, ANYTHING. There’s nothing so boring as a emotionless rock. Even Logan Ninefingers gave a shit about things.
Readers care about characters who are experts at something: There’s a certain joy in reading about someone who is the best in their field. Think Sherlock Holmes.
Readers care about active characters who are doing something: There’s nothing so boring as reading about a character who does nothing, and not only that, isn’t active in the plot. These are characters who are just along for the ride, are “thrust” into destinies, and oftentimes readers (or watchers) get tired of them easily. Why do you think so many people hate Shinji Ikari from Evangelion? (Even if I’d argue his resistance is to make a point… but I digress.)
Book Details
Once the meat of the query letter is done, you need to give all the details: book name, word count, whether it’s a standalone or part of a series.
At the time I was querying The First Sister, #ownvoices was a popular hashtag many agents were looking for, and since the book qualified, I added that. I even put a reason I was querying her (Alexandra Machinist).
I gave a bit on my background as a writer, but if you don’t have anything, don’t sweat it. Most of the time they’re looking to see whether you know how to accept a critique or not (my mentioning attending a workshop was helpful there), not whether you’re already published (alas, no one wanted to publish my book simply because I’d sold a short story).
The final thing I want to talk about are the comps. My suggestion is don’t be like me. When I wrote The First Sister, I literally combined The Handmaid’s Tale and Red Rising in my head, so it made since to me that I use them in the query letter.
But I chose two really, really ridiculously popular books. And most books aren’t going to be really, really ridiculously popular.
In fact, when I spoke with Alexandra on the phone for the first time, she mentioned that she hesitated to offer on the book because she couldn’t think of any other comps that fit, and publishers are looking for recent books that they could imagine this book doing just as good as.
Eventually, we came up with Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice as a comp for publishers: it was feminist, queer scifi with an interesting narrative structure. And I’m pretty sure these comps are still used on websites like Amazon and such (I don’t know for sure because I don’t ever go to places I can read reviews of my work).
Put it all together and what do you get?
A query letter! Which, actually, might end up being reused by the publisher’s marketing department as copy for your cover.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.