The final work­shop from Muse and the Mar­ket­place Con­fer­ence was on the dreaded query let­ter.  If you’re in the query trenches, I hope you’ll find this series helpful!

One of the best and worst things about query­ing is that it’s incred­i­bly sub­jec­tive. It’s more about WHO gets them, so  doing your research is crit­i­cal. Find out which agents rep­re­sent your genre, then find out who they rep­re­sent,  and what they’ve sold recently.

Even if you think you and an agent would be a per­fect fit, you still need to be pre­pared for rejec­tion. You never really know how some­one will react to your pitch.  Queries are the LAST thing agents do and they don’t usu­ally look at them dur­ing the prime hours of the day.  Clients always come first. And you should be happy about that because the whole point is to become a client.

This is why hav­ing a stand out query is so important.

One of the best tips from the work­shop: ALWAYS put the most inter­est­ing thing first.

Some­times that will be the hook, some­times it will be you. If you have an amaz­ing plat­form or a very cool con­nec­tion to the mate­r­ial, that may be the best thing to put first. For exam­ple, if you’re writ­ing a novel about a boy in Nazi Ger­many and you just hap­pened to have been Hitler’s tai­lor — there’s your hook! Pin down what makes you and your book unique and make sure it’s the first thing the agent sees.

That hook will get the agent to read on. The rest of the query should make them want to read pages. You can hem and haw as much as you like about how hard queries are to write but here’s a sim­ple (and poten­tially hard) truth:  a query is a reflec­tion of who you are as a writer.*

Sim­pli­fy­ing and refin­ing a 70K-100K novel into 300 words or less is no easy task. It takes skill, time, and effort. It isn’t the only thing that will make an agent sign you (as men­tioned in this post, they’re in the busi­ness of sell­ing books not queries), but it’s an oppor­tu­nity to wow that dream agent and make them sit up and take notice. This is their very first impres­sion of YOU as a writer. Don’t you want to make it a good one?

Yes, queries are dif­fi­cult. Yes, they’ll make you want to claw your eyes out. But with so much com­pe­ti­tion, it’s worth it not to sound like every­one else in the slush pile.

So how do you know if your query is work­ing? Well, accord­ing to the agent giv­ing the work­shop, if you get a request, you’re in the top 10% of queriers.

*I know some of you want to hit me right now for say­ing this–keep in mind that it’s a direct quote from the work­shop! The fact that I think there’s a lot of truth to this, is beside the point. Yes, I’m duck­ing. You missed.