5 Rules to Know How to Write a Query Letter

Education

A query letter is written to the magazine editors, literary agents and publishing companies by the writers. With the help of a query letter, a writer tries to propose the writing ideas to magazine editors, literary agents and publishing companies. A query letter should be engaging for the literary agents because after reading query letter, they decide whether they should contact with writer or not. In other words, we can also say that a query letter is your first step towards publication of your manuscript. Here, we will discuss five rules that writers should follow while writing a query letter. These rules are explained below by the experts of assignment help;

Address the agent by name

As we have discussed earlier that we have to write a query letter to a literary agent. Therefore, it is necessary for us to address the agent by name in the query letter. By addressing the name of literary agent on the query letter will provide an idea to query agent that this particular writer wants to connect with me. Along with personalization, this will also show the literary agent that you have written this letter after conducting research about the company. The literary agents give preference to those writers who are interested in conducting research over the other writers who don’t have any interest in research. At last, you should make sure that you have spelt the name of query agent correctly.

Cut right to the chase

It is a fact that literary agents don’t have enough time to read such query letters that are not interesting and intriguing for them. Therefore, while writing the query letter, you should focus on your first paragraph. It means that you should make the first paragraph of your letter interesting and intriguing for readers. For this reason, you should introduce the hook of your letter in the first paragraph of your letter. This hook will intrigue the literary agent to read the complete letter. On the other hand, if you have introduced yourself in the first paragraph of the query letter, this thing will not last a bad impression on the mind of the literary agent. As a result, there is a possibility that he will not read your query letter completely.

Sell your manuscript

As we know that it is the desire of almost all the writers to sell their manuscripts to the literary agent by writing a query letter to him. For this reason, it is necessary for a writer that he should present a summary of his book or write in the query letter. This summary should consist of one or two paragraphs and this summary should be the heart and soul of your book. This is also known as the most important part of your query letter. Therefore, you should try to spend enough time on creating a summary of the book. If you want to create more interest in the summary of your book, you can contact the professional editor. While presenting summary of your book in the query letter, you should also make sure that it is written coherent way.

Explain why you have chosen to query this specific agent

By writing a query letter, you are just like a salesperson who tries to sell his product to a specific client. Before selling his product, a salesperson tries to learn everything about the client. After getting enough idea about the nature and tone of the client, the percentage of getting success will be increased. In a similar way, when you are going to write the query letter, you should try to know about the literary agent. You should have enough idea about his publications. After getting an idea about his publications, you should explain in your query letter that you have published these books and the theme of my book is also relevant to the theme of these published books. Therefore, I think that my book will be a great addition to your company.

Mention your platform

After intriguing the literary agent, now, it’s time to introduce you. If a literary agent is interested in your work, he will also try to know about you. For this reason, you can mention your blog which has lots of page views. You can also explain that you attend the literary conferences more than ten times in a year. You can also mention your Twitter account which has more than 10,000 followers or Facebook page which has more than 10,000 likes. These things will last a good impression on the mind of a literary agent and he will try to give preference to your query letter.