Why querying is hard (and how to make it easier)

I have read hundreds of successful queries, edited more than a thousand initial query drafts, and helped writers get pages requests.

As I write this, a writer friend just told me that thanks to my help with her query, she got an offer of representation.

I’ve published research on the mechanics and tendencies of queries, plus a mechanics guide. I run a query (etc.) critique group, and I will be teaching a paid query workshop in January.

And I want to help you understand why querying seems hard — terrifying, to so many people here — and how to make it easier.

Let’s start with perhaps the biggest fear:

Queries are hard because you’ve never done anything like them

You have never had to write a query.

If you graduated from high school, you had to write papers. You had teachers to help you through, though. You had professional, paid help. If you graduated from college, you probably had to write longer papers — and, again, you had professional, paid help.

But where’s the professional, paid help for a query? If you want to shell out $200, you can get it. That’s money a lot of people don’t have. So instead, you plod along alone, or with some friends, venturing into the unknown world of queries.

Fear of the unknown is no joke. It can cause so much stress that it hurts you, so if you’ve worked yourself into a panic or a stomach ache, you’re not alone.

You’re not alone here, either. You have options. You also have several hundred successful queries via the Successful Queries database. Study the queries in your genre and age range. How do they use nouns and verbs? How do they introduce character and world? How do they use modifiers? Study all that stuff, plus their length. Study how they begin, how they continue, how they end. Study their bios. Then apply those lessons to your own query.

Queries are hard because other people make them sound scary and hard

I park in the #amquerying tag on Twitter for most of the day. I like helping people, and queries don’t scare me. They fill me with joy because after I help people, they get pages requests.

But I’m in the minority. Most people hate queries. And a lot of people are scared of them before they even begin, thanks to the number of people who make queries look like multivariable calculus, non-Newtonian physics or the indisputably hardest thing in the world: doing line edits instead of doomscrolling.

Fortunately, science is here to fix the problem. Want to psyche yourself up for a query? Tell yourself you can do it. Yes, really. Actual scientists (not just the pretend ones in your book) ran an experiment in which an ultimate achiever of things — Olympic gold medalist Michael Johnson — “encouraged the [participants] to talk to themselves, saying stuff like, ‘I can beat that score!’”

It worked: “[S]elf-talk not only helped players do better — it made them feel that they were doing better, which is key.”

So next time you get working on your query, begin by telling yourself, “I can do this.” Then you will.

Queries are hard because howww do you condense 30,000 words into 200?

I have edited more than a thousand initial query drafts and several thousand overall. Among the most common problems I’ve found in queries is that they begin with a pile of nouns. That happens for a sensible reason: Your entire book is about one noun. That noun has a name, goals, fears, all of it. So as you prepare to distill 30,000 words into 200, you get a massive pile of words all trying to out from your brain and onto the page. And what are the first few words?

Your character.

A noun.

So your brain goes, “Okay, we started with nouns. Let’s keep going with them.” And before you know it, you’ve written five lines of nouns with maybe two verbs (probably passive or intransitive) that feel more like desperate sentence enders than anything you’d want someone else to see.

This is such a common result that when I try to write my query, it happens to me too — even though I’m on guard for it because I’ve seen it hundreds of times.

Here’s how to avoid it: Do something else on purpose.

Below is the most basic query template I can imagine, complete with highlighted verbs, since sooo many writers get bogged down in nouns. Below that template, I’ve placed a filled-out sample so you can see how it turns out. Read both, then copy and paste one or both into a document and try out your own query using that emphasis on verbs.

QUERY TEMPLATE: [age/occupation] [character] [verb] [situation]. [second sentence of character and worldbuilding. Maybe a third sentence too.]

[then a thing happens.] [character does stuff, and more things happen.] [now character must decide: do [this thing] and [this other thing will happen] or [do a second thing] and [this second thing will happen].

Sample (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as a query): Six-year-old Lucy Pevensie just took the train with her siblings to a strange old man’s house to escape potential World War II bombing. She explores the house and finds a magical closet that leads her to a land full of talking animals. But her siblings don’t believe her — even her older brother Edmund, who went too!

Then they’re misbehaving one day. They hear the housekeeper. They have to hide. Lucy ushers them into the closet, where they find themselves in Narnia — and in a war with the White Witch.

Lucy and her siblings just escaped one war. Now they’re faced with another. But they can’t just run away again: Edmund’s gone missing. If they don’t pursue him, they might lose him forever.

Queries are hard because they’re the opposite of the stuff you were taught to write

My oldest daughter just completed third grade. In English class, she had to write multiple stories and reports. Each had a beginning, a middle, and an end. None of them was terribly long, but the goal was to learn the basics of written, detail-oriented communication, not to write several pages.

As she progresses through school, she’ll have to write longer stories, essays and reports. She’ll go from a short paragraph — three sentences — to one page, then three pages, then five. And if she goes to college, she might have to hit twenty pages. She’ll learn how to find, evaluate and use sources. She’ll learn longer words to use (when they fit). She’ll learn how to write a four-line sentence that I don’t want to burn in effigy.

What she will not learn to do is write short: turn a ten-page paper into a five-page paper.

I attended grade school, high school and three colleges. And in those twenty years of education, I took only one class in which the assignment was to write short, not long. That class’s teacher noted that in his experience across decades of teaching and learning, the American educational institution was focused on getting students to write longer, not shorter and definitely not sharper. So in his class, students had to distill three graduate-level textbook chapters down to eight hundred words.

My first draft of that assignment was a precision-honed … sixteen hundred words.

So I looked at it and tried to troll him by using sharper modifiers — turning four words into one. But I found I could delete far more words by using sharper verbs or just going without noncrucial modifiers. I also discovered that most of my clever notes could be shortened or removed and that going noun-verb-object made things generally strong and clear. After I applied all those filters, I counted words again.

Seven hundred and ninety-four.

That one editing lesson prepared me better for professional work with language than any other ever has. Verb-based writing is stronger than other stuff. So when I help people with queries, I emphasize verbs and agency. The result is sharper, clearer, more concise and more dramatic.

A query has to be sharp, clear, concise and dramatic. School writing exercises don’t teach those four qualities. So when you write a query, think about verbs and nouns, not length.

Queries are hard because you’re thinking about them wrong

When most writers think about a query, they imagine this whole entity:

“Dear Agent,

I am querying you because [stuff]. My book, [thing], [has metadata]. [and possibly comps].

[Brianna Carter needs a thing, but then stuff happens. Now she has to decide.]

I am a [person who does stuff]. [my book has comps].

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Patrick Hopkins”

Within that document are several sections. Within those sections are individual sentences. Your job in writing a query isn’t to write every section in one sitting. Trying to do so might frustrate you, and for no good reason. So instead, chunk your query. I do so as follows:

1. Greeting. (Research this and tailor it to the agent.) “Dear [agent],
2. Does the agent want to dive in? Does the agent want metadata so she knows she reps this material before she spends more time on it? (Does googling this agent not answer the question?) For purposes of example, let’s assume she wants metadata, as in this simple example: “[name] is a [word count standalone age range genre [with series potential]].”
3. Comps. “It may appeal to fans of [whatever].”
4. For purposes of example, we’ll make this the reason we’re querying this agent. “I am querying you because [why, if the agent likes personalization or you think you have a good one].”
5. For purposes of example, we’ll make this the book paragraphs. “[the pitch]”
6. Bio. “I am [whatever]. I have [a publishing history, or not].”
7. Signoff. “Thank you for your time.
   Sincerely,”
8. Name. “[whatever]”

That’s eight sections. And you can chunk it further by separating the pitch into several sections: character/beginning, situation, inciting incident, character reaction, stakes. You can even further chunk each section into noun, verb, object. That way, you’re not writing a whole-ass document. You’re writing one piece of a document, then another piece, and so on.

Queries are hard because AAAAAAAAAAH SO MUCH PRESSURRRRRRRRRRRE!

You have 300 words (including bio and metadata) to convince a stranger to change their life and work to accommodate your book. 300 words to go from unpublished whoever to Your Name, Author.

You can spend years on a book and days on a query and get form-rejected in seconds.

Talk about pressure.

I think part of the problem with queries is that once you send a query, you can’t control anything. The agent might reject you instantly — or, worse, say nothing. I’ve heard of agents not replying to a query for years.

How do you get that control back? How do you relieve that pressure?

1. Do something else. Don’t just check your email every two seconds. Go for a walk. Live your life. Start writing — and falling in love with — something else. Control what you can. You can’t control the agent. You can’t will her into responding. So focus on what you can control.
2. Query from an email address you use for nothing else. That way, when your phone (or whatever) dings, telling you that someone’s emailed your regular account, you’ll know that’s not an agent. Then it’s just a matter of checking your email at specific times (maybe once in the morning and once in the evening) and living your life otherwise.
3. Remember that you are a whole-ass person. You’re not just someone who’s waiting for someone else to say yes or no. You have other obligations. You have other successes. (You have laundry and dishes.) Your success does not ride on one person saying yes. You have already succeeded because you wrote a book.
4. Query in batches. Waiting for one person to get back to you is brutal. Waiting for five makes you five times more likely to get a request, or at least an email.
5. Don’t query your dream agent(s) until you know your submission package (query, pages, whatever else) works. Make a list of perhaps 50 agents in three tiers: 10 dream, 20 solid, 20 acceptable. Prepare the packages for the 10 dream agents, but do not query them first. Query 10 of the solid ones, maybe 10 of the acceptable ones. If you get no hits, revise, then go at more of the solid/acceptable ones. If you do gets hits, then go after five of your dream agents. And if you gets LOTS of hits, then go after all of your dream agents. So many writers are terrified of missing their shot with their dream agent, and they’re right to be — because they aren’t ready.
6. Remember that you can resubmit to many agents if you’ve edited massively.
7. Try some of these tips.

Comps. Are. Worse. Than. Death.

The top three query concerns I see:

1. AAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaugh
2. WHY WON’T THE AGENT RESPOND? I SENT THE QUERY SEVEN WHOOOOOOLE SECONDS AGO!
3. Comps! HOW! EVEN?

I’m not alone in seeing comps as a big concern, which is why the publishing ecosystem has a number of articles on how to find comps. The advice boils down to a few things I’ll repeat for whoever hasn’t seen them:

A) Ask your friends who read that stuff.

B) Ask a librarian or bookstore employee.

C) Use these services: NoveList, BookBrowse and Literature-Map.

All of those things might give you a semidecent list of titles. But they might also not give you anything recent enough, or nonfamous enough. See, agent preferences for comps differ, as this article shows, so this is just one more area where you need to research your agent. And in researching that agent, you might find a title you can use.

Querying is so hard because all the advice is different

When you get advice on anything, ask yourself two things:

1. Who is giving the advice?
2. Does it make sense/make the product better?

If the adviser has no credentials and the advise doesn’t make sense, then maybe the advice isn’t worth much. But if the adviser has been doing this for a bit, then maybe the advice is worth taking.

Another great option for figuring out if the advice makes sense is to see if it applies to work that already succeeded. Again, the Successful Queries database can help here.

Still need help with your query? Join my group! It’s free. Just read rule 1. Good luck :)