For the next few weeks I spent my days on the manuscript, and my nights on putting together materials I hoped would get me an agent. The most basic document you need to approach an agent is a query letter. This is what you use as your initial introduction to an agent, a forum to outline your book, and a request for representation.
There are mixed opinions on how to best structure a query letter, but I took the most commonly mentioned aspects and built a template. It was one page (very detrimental to go longer, I had read), had a section at the top for contact information – both mine as well as the agency’s – and was followed by a salutation. After that was a paragraph where I supplied a brief introduction to the book, and the second paragraph was where I summarized the book, trying not to use more than 150 words. The third and final paragraph was where I inserted a little information about myself, thanked the agent for their time, and then offered them (trying to not sound desperate) an avenue for further discussions.
A query letter is one of the most basic elements of soliciting a literary agent. But it is nearly as challenging as writing a book. For one, you have maybe 7-10 seconds to catch enough of someone’s attention to convince them to continue reading. And summarizing your book? Something that’s maybe 100,000 words? Trying to condense that into 150 words without losing the essence of your book, the character conflicts, the depth, the plot twists, the humor, all of it, is nearly impossible.
No, that’s not quite right. It is impossible. You can’t completely capture your story in such a small space. But…what you can do…you hope…is make the little part you can share as compelling as possible, so that an agent will have enough interest to maybe request parts of your manuscript.
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