What Is a Query Letter?
Quick answer: A query letter is a one-page pitch to a literary agent or editor: a hook, a short description of your book, comparison titles, and a brief bio.
A query letter is a one-page business letter asking a literary agent or editor to read your book. It contains four things: a line of housekeeping (title, genre, word count), a pitch of roughly 150 to 250 words that presents your protagonist, their problem, and the stakes, one or two comparison titles that place the book on a shelf, and a short bio. Its only job is to get the manuscript requested.
Almost every traditionally published novel you have read began as one of these letters in a stranger's inbox. Agents receive thousands a year and decide in a minute or two, which sounds brutal until you realise it also means the format is learnable, the expectations are public, and a clear letter about a strong book genuinely stands out.
The standard shape, paragraph by paragraph
Open with housekeeping or personalisation: the book's title, genre, and word count, plus, if honest, why this agent, such as a client of theirs whose readers overlap with yours. Then the pitch, usually two paragraphs. Introduce the protagonist and their ordinary world in a sentence, break that world with the story's central problem, and end on the choice or threat that drives the book. Do not summarise the plot; dramatise the situation.
Follow with comparison titles, then the bio: publication credits, contest placings, relevant expertise, kept to a few lines. Close politely with an offer of the full manuscript. The whole letter should sit comfortably under 400 words. White space is your friend; a dense page reads as a dense book.
What agents are actually screening for
Three questions run behind every read. Can this person write, which the letter's own prose answers before the manuscript is ever opened. Is there a story here, meaning a specific character with a specific problem and consequences, rather than themes and atmosphere. And can I sell it, which is where genre clarity and word count do quiet, decisive work: a 250,000-word debut thriller signals trouble no pitch can rescue.
Notice what is absent from that list: your marketing plan, your life story, your certainty that this book will be a bestseller. Confidence is conveyed by precision. The letters that fail most often are not the clumsy ones but the vague ones, pitching a journey of secrets and redemption that could describe four hundred different books.
Comparison titles without embarrassment
Comps answer the shelf question: who buys this. Good comps are recent, ideally from the last five years, successful but not stratospheric, and honest about tone. Saying your novel will appeal to readers of Gillian Flynn's domestic suspense tells an agent what promise your book makes. Saying it is the next Harry Potter tells them you have not read the room.
Comps can cross media when the fit is real, a novel pitched as a particular film's mood in book form can work, and they can be structural: the dual timeline of one book, the voice of another. If you truly cannot find comps, that is worth investigating before querying, because it sometimes means the book's category is unclear even to its author.
Using your bio line well
New writers worry the bio paragraph will expose them. It will not; debut authors are the entire point of querying, and no credits reads as normal. What earns its place: magazine publications, contest results with the contest named, relevant credentials, such as a police procedural written by a paramedic. What does not: hobbies, how long the book took, or your family's opinion of it.
Contest credits work best when they are checkable and specific. A placing in a competition that publishes its shortlists, or a scored contest where you can honestly say a story placed in the top tier, gives an agent a fact rather than an adjective. One or two lines is plenty; the pitch remains the star.
Mistakes that sink queries
The classics: opening with rhetorical questions (Have you ever wondered what you would do for love?), summarising the entire plot ending included, querying an unfinished novel, addressing the agent by the wrong name, and attaching the manuscript when guidelines say paste pages below. Each one signals the same thing, that the writer has not studied how this works, and agents extrapolate from letters to working relationships.
Subtler failures: pitching two books at once, apologising for the work, or spending the pitch on backstory so the actual plot never appears. Write the letter, leave it a week, then reread it asking one question: does a stranger now know who the book is about, what goes wrong, and why they cannot look away? If yes, send it.
What poets can take from this
- Keep the whole letter under 400 words; a query is a pitch, not a synopsis.
- Name your protagonist, their problem, and the stakes; vague themes sink more queries than weak prose.
- Choose comparison titles from the last five years that share your book's shelf and tone.
- Follow each agent's submission guidelines exactly, down to the pasted pages and subject line.
- Query in small batches of six to ten so you can revise the letter if requests do not come.
Try it yourself
Write the pitch paragraph of a query letter for a famous novel you love, without naming it, then show it to a well-read friend. If they can identify the book, study what specifics made that possible and apply the same pressure to a pitch for your own manuscript.
Questions
How long should a query letter be?
One page or less, usually 250 to 400 words in the email itself. Agents read hundreds a week, and brevity is part of the professionalism being assessed. The manuscript pages, where guidelines ask for them, do the deeper persuading.
Do you query before finishing the book?
For fiction, no: agents expect a complete, revised manuscript, because a request for the full can arrive the same day. Nonfiction works differently, selling on a proposal, but novelists should query only when the book is genuinely done.
How many agents should you query at once?
Batches of six to ten work well. Simultaneous querying is standard and expected, but small waves let you fix a letter that is not earning requests before you have spent every suitable agent on the weak version.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the August contest and have your own poem read and scored.