Query triage: Easy things to fix
I edited eight queries last night. Hard work. Wonderful work. Below is basic advice for not getting form rejected for an easy-to-fix problem:
Include age range. If the agent doesn’t know they rep it, they’ll pass. Middle grade, young adult, adult. Also, New Adult does not exist in traditional publishing, so don’t use it if you want to be traditionally published.
Include genre, and ensure the metadata/about-this-book genre matches the pitch genre. You say you wrote a fantasy, but where’s the fantasy? If the genre in the metadata paragraph doesn’t match the pitch, what genre is anything? Fantasy queries should contain clearly fantastical elements. Historical fiction should contain a clear reference to the historical period. And while you can have a fantasy with romance elements, you cannot have a fantasy-romance. You need to pick a genre (probably fantasy) so the agent knows where it will go in a bookstore. A list of genres based on the Successful Queries database: contemporary, fantasy, historical fiction, horror, magical realism/fabulism, mystery, paranormal, postapocalyptic, romance, science fiction, speculative, suspense/thriller, urban fantasy, women’s fiction.
Include active characters. If your characters notice and wonder and want and think and discover but don’t DO anything intentionally, what is the book about but someone on the outside looking in? They need to hunt or go or insist or even follow.
Include stakes. If the choice your character has to make isn’t clear, you haven’t done the work.
Include realistic comps. You are not Alfred Hitchcock, Sarah J. Maas or Gertrude Chandler Warner. Don’t comp them. In my experience, this is not an auto-pass — I saw a query recently that comped Coraline, which is A) Neil Gaiman and thus from someone iconic, B) more than a decade old and C) turned into a movie. But you are probably not the exception to the rule to not comp iconic work.
Once you’ve done that work, or if you need help with it, seek me out here or here — I’ve helped a dozen writers get pages requests since May.
Good luck :)