[Mark Lawrence]

I sent this query letter out 4 times. Two agents never wrote back, one sent a form rejection, one signed me up.

I'm not saying this is a good query letter. In fact it's probably not. It says nothing about the book and thereby blatantly ignores the advice on the website of the agency that signed me:

We need a good covering letter that is typed, properly constructed and checked for errors in spelling and grammar. If you cannot even take the trouble over your short letter, it will not say much for the rest of your writing. The letter should be concise and you should be able to tell us your story/plot in a paragraph. For non-fiction,tell us why you have chosen this subject. You have to grab our full attention at this stage.

However, for what ever reason, it worked. To my mind it says that my agent was more interest in the book than the query letter. If I were an agent I would pick up page 1 and start reading. If at the end of page 1 I was still interest in reading, I might look at the query letter etc.

I'm not an agent though :)

Here it is:

Dear Sir/Madam,
I have enclosed a synopsis of my book ‘Prince of Thorns' and the first few chapters. Since my chapters are pretty short I’ve sent in the first 8, which clocks in at around 12,000 words.
I’ve published around 20 short stories in paying magazines over the last 3 years under the pen name *** ****. My most recent sales have been two 6,000 words stories to Black Gate magazine, at the princely rate of 3 cents a word.
I’m 40 years old, married, father of four. I have a Ph.D in mathematics, a degree in physics and I really have been involved in rocket science (whilst working for on contracts for the US government). I have US and UK citizenship and have lived the majority of my life in the UK.

[KatG]

LOL, you didn't send them a query letter, you sent them a cover letter with your submission package. The cover letter provided nice bio information -- that you had a publication track record, including a major mag like Black Gate, and that you had possibly useful science knowledge as a scientist in your day job. None of which mattered as much as the book itself, but they had the synopsis and then actual text to decide that from, and yes, that is indeed the most important thing.

Some agents take submission packets right off the bat, with synopsis and sample text. They have decided to skip the traditional query letter stage and go right to submission. It's a lot easier to do now with e-submissions, where employees just have to log submissions in and open files, rather than unpack, log and organize large piles of paper to be read. Since authors are really awful at writing query letters and providing information mostly, this is a very practical solution. Even in submission packets, they would probably prefer a cover letter that tells them something quick about the book, for sorting purposes, but your cover letter was sufficient to move the submission on to the persons who handle the SFF titles for the agency and didn't sound out of bounds from what they handled.

Other agents, however, do not want you to initially submit text to them. They don't want to spend the time reading ms. if the story doesn't sound interesting to them at all. So they want the traditional query letter, asking them if they would like to see manuscript, possibly with an attached, longer plot synopsis. And it's those query letters that we are usually dealing with here in the forum.

If you are sending actual text, say first chapter onwards, without having to solicit the request for ms. first, then the cover letter with that text does decrease vastly in importance. Still, when describing the book, verbally or in a letter, it helps to be as clear as possible and not hide your light under a bushel.

[Mark Lawrence]

Well that makes some sense. I guess in their text they talked about the 'cover letter' not the 'query letter'. But given that they wanted a paragraph of story/plot it does seem the boundary between query and cover is somewhat blurred. In electronic communication it seems pointless not to attach your manuscript so it can be read if required - and the query reduces to a cover letter convincing them to take a look. In snail-mail I guess the query letter avoids the arrival of hundreds of unwanted fat manuscripts. The 4 agencies I chose at random all wanted 3 chapters, which (for me at least) fit into a modest envelope and don't require the death of too many forests. So the whole caboodle (chapters, synopsis, cover-letter) was essentially a query about whether they wanted the whole book to read.

I'm still busy learning this stuff after the event!

[tmso]

Thanks for posting. Useful to a newbie like myself. :)