Submission Sunday 3.5.23: Query Letters

Tips for querying literary agents with a compelling letter

Happy Sunday, writers! Thank you for subscribing! So let’s say you’re a novelist with a completed manuscript, a nonfiction writer with an engaging book proposal, or a memoirist with one or both—what’s next? (Poets, you might want to read this P&W article for a deep dive on the relationship between agents and poets.) The next step is to start contacting agents to represent you on the road to publication. A future Submission Sunday post will tackle how to publish without an agent, but for now, we’ll assume you want an agent, which means you need a query letter.

One of the author services I offer is to help writers draft query letters, and I also used to assign query letters in my manuscript workshops, so I can tell you from experience that some writers find query letters to be exceptionally painful. But they don’t have to be!

I’ve put together some of my favorite tips below, and in a future links roundup, I’ll gather some of my favorite articles. The next tips post for paid subscribers will be dedicated to how to find the agents you want to send the query letter to. (I’d also be interested in hearing from subscribers whether you’d like to alternate the residencies in the biweekly submission opportunities with an agent profile. Drop a note in the comments.)