You have found the agent you want to make your own. You have searched the best five novels in your genre and from reading the authors acknowledgments you have found the agent you want to represent you. You have the name and an address, and now you are looking at your standard business letter template from your favorite word processor, and you don’t know how best to get this agent to actually want to represent you. These are a few suggestions to help you snare your agent of choice.
Only The Best Will Do.
You are an artist. To produce your novel, you have put out a great deal of effort. Only you know the amount of blood and sweat that has gone into your literary progeny. You have, by this time, insured it is absolutely perfect technically. There are no errors in grammar. Your plot is well developed. The dueling scar on the right side of your villains face so obvious in chapter three has not migrated to the left side when your hero dispatches him in chapter thirty-two. That will be as obvious to an agent as a catsup stain on a page. Truly make your book an exceptional work of creativity in every respect.
Identify with Your Agent Of Choice
You want the agent to see you’ve done a great deal of credible work picking him. Point out an author he represents who you most admire and how that, or how those books influence your style and your point of view. Don’t make this a dissertation. You are only trying to show how well your book would fit in his stable of successes.
Remember, Your Agent is The Goose That Lays Golden Eggs
You need to be able to bring the agent to you. Other writers are trying to snare the goose as diligently as you. You need a hook that will set firmly and powerfully in your agent’s creative psyche. You do that by finding something in your book that is far better than the competition, and then you present that in the most compelling manner you can. You cannot put your book in your letter, but your hook is how you show how good you are. Don’t be afraid of your most salient feature. Use it to show how good you really are.
The mark of an excellent hook is when the agent writes you back and includes a contract for you to sign.
About You
If you’ve done this right, the agent will want more information about you. He will not get the most meaningful information from your query letter. He will go to Google, he will look for you on social media, and he will also search for you on numerous legal sites. You would be a bit silly if you did not take a few lines to toot your own accomplishments. If you have published in print or electronically, mention it. If you are active in writing communities, mention that. Remember, you are a writer, and writers write to be read. Mention a few but not all of what you have done.
Follow The Guidelines
You are going to find information about your agent and his company on the Internet. You will learn about him and what he expects and the kind of writers he wants to represent. Most importantly, he will have a page or more on his guidelines. Ignore those at your peril. If you know best, you probably will never hear back from this person and with good reason. If he has taken the time and the effort to spell out exactly how he wants to interact with you, why would you ignore what you have read? Even if you feel some of his wants are trivial and silly, learn to accept his requirements as necessary for your communicating with him.
The Need For Brevity
Congratulations, you’ve just finished writing a novel. You have structured a series of plot twists and subplots that span between three and five hundred pages. Having accomplished all that work, I’m going to hit you with a brutal challenge with absolutely no room for discussion or compromise. Your query letter will not be greater than 500 words. Some would limit that to 300 words. You need some degree of freedom to express your strong points but do some serious planning how you will organize and how you will write that letter.
If you use Google, you will find some decent examples of query letters. I’m not giving any web addresses of any good examples. What works for me and some other writers will fail miserably for you. Write it yourself first and if you must look at examples do so afterward.
In closing, treat the writing of your query letter as seriously as you treated the writing of your novel.