Note: This is another post for authors. If you’re just here as a reader, you may want to skip this one. Or stick around for some insight into the exciting world of publishing.
It happened. Inspiration struck, and you have a killer idea for a book. You grab the laptop, open a blank page, and start typing. This time it will be perfect. This time it will be different. This time it will sell. Right?
You are doing it wrong
To be clear, this post is for aspiring authors of commercial fiction. If you don’t hope to sell your book, then write whatever the hell you want, however the hell you want. But if you want to sell copies, or *gasp* get traditionally published, you’re starting at the wrong end.
Picture your future. You’ve written your masterpiece. You’re ready to find an agent who can sell your book to Hachette or Tor or whatever. What do you do next?
You write a stellar query letter. If you can’t, your book never makes it out of the slush pile.
A query letter is more than wordsmithing; it is a demonstration that your book has all the elements needed to sell. If you missed one of them a year ago when you started writing, it is far too late to fix it now. Your only option is to throw out the book and start over.
Don’t be that guy. Write your query letter first.
Real Quick. What is a query letter?
There are steps to getting a book sold that feel like homework. They are a drag. They are also vital to selling your work. And if you wait until you’re done writing the book, it may be too late.
A query letter is the sales pitch for your book. It should contain the following pieces of information:
- At least two comparable books that have sold a ton of copies, and were released in the last three years.
- The hook of your book
- A (brief) synopsis.
- A short bio that explains why you’re the right person to tell the story.
Your bio is out of your hands; you are who you are, and you’re probably not already a NYT best-selling author. If this is book one, you’ll succeed or die on the other three points. So before you put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard), make sure you can nail them. If you can’t, you are probably not writing a saleable book.
Okay, I’m ready
Great. I’ll give you the must-dos below. Don’t worry about hitting the quality bar for submission to an agent. The purpose of this exercise is to make sure you’ve got all the elements in place. You can make it perfect after you write the book.
Let’s get started.
Step 1: Find your comps
Your first job is to know your book-to-be’s genre. This sounds dumb, right? Doesn’t everyone know this? You’d be surprised. Lots of writers like to tell stories that don’t slot cleanly into established commercial buckets. That’s great, but they will be much harder to sell. You should be able to walk into a bookstore (if you can find one) and point to the shelf your book goes on.
Your book can still cross genre boundaries, but it should have one foot solidly in a specific genre. Different genres come with different reader expectations. Your book must conform, or your readers will complain.
Once you’ve got that part nailed down, go find two recent successful books on this metaphorical shelf for your best-seller to sit between. These are your comps, and they establish that your story is one that people are interested in reading.
Again, these books need to be from the last three years. Like all cultural productions, fiction is trend-driven. If you are not on trend, the only path to success is starting a trend. That sounds sexy, but it’s not something unknown people get to do. It’s like high school; the popular kids set the fashions. The rest of us either fall in line or live as pariahs.
The easiest queries for an agent to accept contain the phrase: “Best seller X meets best seller Y.” The market is proven. The trend is a given. All that’s left is to verify that you wrote a reasonable book and cut you a check.
If you can’t find those two titles, you’re going to need to bend or reshape your idea until you can. Otherwise, you’re not writing as a business, you’re writing as a hobby.
Once you identify the books whose coat-tails you will ride, make sure you’ve read them with an eye to characters and story structure. This will give you a sense of reader expectations that your book should conform to.
Step 2: Lay out your hook
Hopefully, this part is easy. You were excited about writing a book. You must have a great idea, right? No?
If you can’t write one or two sentences that draw a potential reader in, you don’t have a story. Or at least, not a marketable one. That doesn’t mean your books needs to be dumbed down to fit on an index card, but it does mean there should be a fascinating central conflict that you can explain succinctly. If you can’t yet, rework your idea until you can.
Step 3: Write the synopsis
Don’t panic! This isn’t a blow-by-blow of plot points. Save that for your outline – or skip it entirely if you’re one of those pantser people.
The query letter synopsis is a few hundred word distillation of the things that make your book special. You don’t need to have plotted the whole book out. You don’t even need to know how it ends. You do need to know who your protagonist is, what challenge(s) they face, and what is interesting about them, their circumstances, and their world.
As with the other sections, if you’re having trouble writing your synopsis, it’s a good sign your concept needs refinement.
What if I plan to self-publish?
Good for you. You’re cutting out two gatekeepers, the agent and the publishing house. What you haven’t cut out are readers and their tastes.
Even if you have no intention of ever querying an agent, writing the query letter first will ensure your book has both an audience and the fundamentals to connect with them. You might be satisfied with a smaller audience than an agent would, but you still need some audience. Otherwise, you might as well shout your story into a paper bag and throw it off an overpass.
Once you’re a successful writer with a large following you can start breaking all the rules. Until then, the way forward is on the beaten path. The simplest way to avoid a year wasted wandering in the woods is to write the query letter first.