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Guest post by Trident Media Group Literary Agent Mark Gottlieb

Five Things that Make me Want to Read a Query

One: The Hook

Having a strong sales pitch for a book can go a long way. We sometimes call this the elevator pitch. I like to work with authors that know how to speak about their book in a concise and interesting way. This is everyone's first impression of a book, so the hook should go right upfront in a query letter in order to draw the reader’s attention in. I like to think of it as the thesis line for a query letter. In a snapshot we should get a sense of what the book is about in movie tagline fashion. Here are a couple of examples of good hooks:

A dark secret born out of World War II lies at the heart of a Sicilian American family in this emotional and sweeping saga of guilt, revenge, and, ultimately, redemption.

They say she’s a murderess. She claims she’s innocent. But Lucy has been known to tell lies…

Two: Comparative/Competitive Titles

Sometimes it is easier to say that a book is “this meets that” than it is to go into a longer description. That’s where the comp title process can be helpful. Dreaming up a good comparative or competitive title can help place a manuscript in the minds of literary agents and book editors trying to figure out where a book might go on their list, or where it might go in a bookstore. This is also helpful to a publisher when they are trying to figure out how much to offer for a book. Publishers will run what is called a profit and loss statement or a “P&L” and the magic numbers they will plug into that sheet are usually the numbers on books they feel are similar. We as author and agent would much rather be the ones to give books with stronger numbers to publishers as comparisons! Bookstores will also eventually ask the book publisher for comps they feel are similar, so a writer that has a few comp titles assembled will be miles ahead in the book publishing process.

Three: The Book

Of course we need to know more about the book and what makes it exciting! I speak more about the urgency of a book's story in this interview. A couple of paragraphs should be devoted to some of the exciting plot details of a manuscript and perhaps speak to some of the development of the characters. Demonstrating some of the plot will be more important to commercial fiction, whereas literary fiction tends to be more concerned with character development. Careful not to spoil too much here the description! This is more so about enticing readers into wanting to know more and taking this opportunity to showcase one's writing abilities. It is helpful to model these paragraphs off of the descriptive copy used on the back of book covers and book product pages. That will lend a comfortable feel for how this information is presented, especially since a lot of strong query letters go on to become jacket copy on published books! That is why writing a knockout query letter is so important.

Four: Author Bio

In the last paragraph of the query letter we should see the author bio, along with some more ancillary information such as relevant writing experience and writing credentials. Writing experience can mean many different things. Sometimes this is a matter of having been published in literary magazines or literary journals. Other times this can mean publications online or in papers. Writing credentials can include things such as an MFA, PhD or even attendance at a prestigious writing workshop such as the Yale Writers Workshop, Iowa Writers Workshop, or Breadloaf. A writer should tell us a bit more about themselves too. Info such as how they came or writing, what has influenced them and perhaps where they live and what they do in their day-to-day. After all of that info it might be good to include a link to an author website or author social media pages.

Five: Personalize the Address

If an author wants to get the attention of a literary agent, we cannot forget this important point. When opening a letter, it is nice to see that a writer took their time to do their research to know who the literary agent is and what they are about. For how awkward would it be to send a query for a children's picture book to a literary agent that specializes in romance/women's fiction? This is a way to make the query letter attention-grabbing, since this is a writer's chance to make their letter unique to the receiver. For instance, a writer might consider visiting my Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn pages to learn more about me and the types of books I have been working on and they can mention something they learned in the opening of the letter. It shows that the writer took some time, care and attention to detail.

Surprise: Bonus Content!

In addition to the five points above, this item is something of a special surprise. A very lucky writer might approach the query letter with some pre-publication blurbs or endorsements in-hand. Having a quote from a bestselling or award-winning author can go a long way. Literary agents love to receive queries with blurbs since that helps make the query more attractive to book publishers. Some authors are only willing to provide endorsements after a manuscript finds a publisher, but others might make an exception. Some authors might provide a blurb based on a sample of the manuscript too. Keep in mind that it is about quality over quantity when receiving such endorsements.

Mark Gottlieb

Mark Gottlieb is a prominent literary agent working at book publishing’s leading literary agency Trident Media Group in New York City. He has ranked highly among literary agents across the industry for overall number of deals and other individual categories. While at Trident Media Group, Mark Gottlieb has represented New York Times bestselling authors as well as major award-winning authors. He has optioned and sold numerous books to production companies and studios for film and TV adaptation. Mark Gottlieb greatly enjoys working with authors to help manage and grow their careers with the resources available at Trident Media Group. In addition to having worked at the company’s Foreign Rights Department, he also ran the company’s Audiobook Department. Utilizing his drive and intuition for discovering talented writers, he is currently expanding his client list of authors. As a literary agent he looks forward to bringing authors to the largest possible audience.

Life as a writer can be hard sometimes.

Success is elusive; fans shift as often as a summer wind.

Yet, we persevere, writing into the late hours of the night and waking in the early hours of the morning to log the hours and enter, for a time, the worlds we create. When I first started writing, more than a decade ago, it was because I loved the idea of immersing myself in a place where I could construct the narrative; walk through dense forests and to the tops of mountains. Over time the process became more about writing as a tool to move through emotions and languishing memories that required catharsis.

Writing takes on many forms, for many different writers, over the course of our lives.

For me, the process is the reward.

I love to write.

When I ask myself that silly question of what I would do if I had all the money in the world, the answer is always quite simple: write. Now more than a decade later, I have a renewed sense of purpose and have become quite adept at balancing the spinning plates of responsibility.

Recently, between being a full-time graduate student and writer, I joined Empirical magazine as an editor – among other responsibilities. A national magazine similar in spirit to Harper’s or The Atlantic, the magazine is firmly rooted in a West Coast sensibility. There is a little something for everyone, and honestly, the hope is that everyone will take a look. Contributors to the magazine come from around the globe and cover everything from politics to fiction.

Working at a magazine, especially at this point in its maturation, is a wonderful experience. There are so many moving parts that enliven your day. Sometimes I spend the day sorting through fiction and poetry submissions, searching for that piece of prose, or perhaps a stanza, that ensnares my imagination. Other days I am editing, constantly referring to the Chicago Manual of Style to ascertain the correct usage of an archaic sentence structure. As a writer, the prospect of editing and rummaging through the work of others might not sound exciting, but there are some wonderful consequences:

1. You learn to become a better editor of your own work

2. You begin to recognize redundant sentence structures and overused phrases

3. Your grasp of language grows exponentially

However, the most important component for me is:

4. You get to help others bring their work into a public forum

For many writers, and certainly for me early in my writing career, the notion of being picked up by a magazine or a small press was foremost in my mind. It was that distant promise of publication and everything that goes with it that pushed me forward. When I got rejection letters, most of which lacked a personal touch, I would get down on my writing, denigrate my ability.

The years passed, during which thousands of rejection letters amassed, and I realized that the pursuit of writing for a purely extrinsic reward was dooming myself to Vegas-style odds. I became clear to me that I needed to write because I loved it, and then find a way to share it with others – even if it was not through traditional routes. I found that I was more comfortable with my writing when I did it for the pure joy of it.

Now that I am on the other side of the fence, so to speak, I have noticed a few myths about submitting to paying publications that otherwise mystified and frustrated me prior to becoming an editor and being responsible for interacting with first-time and established authors.

I have decided to provide a humorous, but serious, collection of things you should do and things you shouldn’t do when submitting and entering into a discourse with a publication – sprinkled, of course, with some anecdotes. And without further ado (or perhaps slight ado if you count this sentence here):

Things You Should Do

1. Read the publication you are submitting to before sending an email. This one sounds obvious, I know. However, it happens so often that it warrants mentioning. If you have written a brilliant piece of prose that is about zombies, it is quite likely that Popular Mechanics will not be that interested in it. Pick up an issue of the magazine you are interested in submitting to and familiarize yourself with the kinds of stories they publish. The next part is the hardest part: be honest. Does your piece fit with what they publish?

2. Read and follow the submission instructions. Again, a no-brainer. If you are thinking that you don’t know where to find the submission instructions and you just have an email address, be prepared for disappointment. Your email might go to submission purgatory with a one-liner response about having received your correspondence – if you’re lucky.

3. Address your submission to the appropriate person. If you are thinking that I am giving you the obvious pointers, then you are quite right. With that in mind, imagine that I still receive hundreds of emails a month that manage to ignore these simple suggestions. If you are writing a stunning expose on corporate greed, the poetry editor is probably not the best destination for your work.

4. Edit your work. I tell this to students a lot, so I will mention it here as well: spell check in Microsoft Word is not sufficient. I am not saying that you need to be a copyeditor to submit to a magazine, but do yourself a favor and read it out loud. If it something sounds funny when you read it, you can only imagine how it will sound to an editor who is choosing among thousands of articles and stories to determine what goes to print.

5. Be cognizant of turnarounds. By this I mean, the amount of time between when you sent in the work until you hear back from an editor about the status of your submission. Nothing will send your work to the bottom of a slush pile than to send a follow-up email the day after you submitted, wondering whether or not you are going to be in the magazine. Most publications will post how long it takes to hear back from them about the status of a submission, and an amount of time after which you should contact them if you haven’t heard from them.

Things You Shouldn’t Do

1. Send an email telling an editor that they would be stupid not to publish your work. It always surprises me when I get an email telling me that I need to publish a story, poem, or piece of nonfiction because it is the next best thing. Top this off with letting me know that I would be a fool not to accept it, almost guarantees a trip to the trash can.

2. Send a photocopy of your story by registered mail. If you want to have your story in a magazine, start by giving it to editors in a format that they can actually use. By sending a faded and blurry photocopy of your forty-word poem and declaring that it is a soul-searching masterpiece does not inspire as much confidence as you would think.

3. Contact an editor on a frequent basis about the status of your submission. I have to sort through hundreds of emails a day, edit for the current issue, and work on editing an anthology; not to mention a thousand other intangibles. We posted a time table about getting back to you for a reason: read it.

4. Be discouraged by a form rejection letter. This is a bitter pill to swallow for many writers. They think the form rejection letter means that the editor didn’t read their work, or simply had things already planned and was stringing writers along. The reality is on any given month I send out hundreds upon hundreds of rejection letters. There is simply not enough time in the day to offer feedback to every single person. This not to say that I do not offer feedback, or that editors do not offer feedback in general, but instead the process is streamlined so writers can be responded to in a reasonable amount of time.

5. Call the magazine to find out about your submission. This is subsumed by not contacting an editor about the status of your submission before enough time has passed, but I thought it warranted a special mention considering it is really going the extra mile in terms of being an irritation. If we haven’t gotten back to you yet, calling us is not going to suddenly make us more accessible.

6. Send another email with corrections. Read twice, send once. If you don’t think what you sent is ready for publication, then please don’t send it. You get one chance at a first impression, and nothing speaks to being underprepared and unprofessional than sending a draft and immediately following up with another draft. If your piece needs work, note that in your submission, but don’t send a series of emails chronicling the different stages of the edits for that story. The exception, of course, is if you have already been accepted and you have been asked to make edits.

7. Contact the magazine to air your frustrations about not being selected. I say this with all seriousness. It is very likely that you got rejected because the piece was not a good fit and not that the magazine has decided to order a hit on your writing career. Please don’t treat it that way. Lashing out at a publication for sending a form rejection letter, or passing on a piece you have written, reeks of a lack of professionalism and could impact your ability to publish elsewhere. Many editors are friends, especially in the digital age, and word spreads fast.

8. Contact the magazine to ask if you think a story you are working on would be a good fit elsewhere. I can appreciate the sentiment. A lot of editors are writers themselves, and they love talking about the process and the product. I find myself building friendships with writers, those we publish and those we do not, and often I will give them suggestions about their work. However, if you don’t know me personally and have never been published or solicited in any way to use me as a sounding board, then do not contact me and ask if a poem or story would be a good fit at another magazine. If you think it is ready for publication, then submit it here. An obvious exception would be if the writer knew the story would not be a good fit and asked because they were uncertain in venturing into new territory.

I could probably keep listing things you shouldn’t do, but I will wrap it up there. I encourage you to keep trying and keep writing. Things only get better with time, and time is all we really have. I love to hear from other writers and potential readers, so please stop by and say hello.

Guest post by Dan O'Brien, a psychologist, author, editor, philosopher, martial artist, and skeptic, he has published several novels and currently has many in print, including: The End of the World Playlist, Bitten, The Journey, The Ocean and the Hourglass, Deviance of Time, The Path of the Fallen, The Portent, The Twins of Devonshire and the Curse of the Widow, and Cerulean Dreams. Follow him on Twitter (@AuthorDanOBrien) or visit his blog http://thedanobrienproject.blogspot.com. He also works as an editor at Empirical, a national magazine with a strong West Coast vibe. Find out more about the magazine at www.empiricalmagazine.com.

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