The ghost in your query

Last week, we talked about query letters and I asked you to pop your draft letters up on Townhouse for feedback.

That’s always an illuminating exercise, and on the whole, what I saw was pretty convincing.

But one topic I did want to address was this: your query letter absolutely wants to deliver your core elevator pitch… but you probably don’t want to state your elevator pitch in the letter.

Now yes, that’s sounds puzzling – and I’ll explain – but I should also say that it’s easy to overthink these things. For one thing, personal tastes differ. Some agents will relish what I or other agents would not advise.

More important, though, a query letter itself isn’t terribly important. You need to talk about your book in a way that interests the agent – but the default for an agent is to read the first page or two of your work. It’s way better to have a drab query letter and some excellent opening chapters, than to have a dazzling query letter and drab text. The latter manuscript will never be picked up. The first one almost certainly will be.

So, please don’t get stressed. If you want more help with the query letter, last week’s Lesson Three of How to Get a Literary Agent course will tell you EVERYTHING that you need to know. (If you’re a Premium Member, log in to access this course for free. Otherwise you can purchase the course for just £99).

OK. So. Elevator pitch and query letter.

As you know, I love a very tight elevator pitch:

“A Cardiff-set crime novel, featuring a detective who used to think she was dead.”

That’s 14 words and I wasn’t even really trying to go as short as possible.

I don’t even mind elevator pitches that just collapse into a list of ingredients. For example, here are some that just list ingredients but still have a relish to them. (The first pitch describes my Fiona series, of course; the other two are just invented.)

“Murder mystery + detective who used to believe she was dead.”

“Antarctic research station + troubled oceanographer + ghosts”

“YA story: Victorian circus + orphan boy + murder story”

But an elevator pitch is, first and foremost, for you. It’s so you can define and understand the purpose of your novel. It’s so you can keep the text on the iron tracks that will deliver commercial (and actually artistic) quality.

From that point of view, the scantier your pitch, the more clearly you yourself understand what you’re dealing with. But a query letter has to dress like a query letter. You can’t just toss out a dozen words, like ham knuckles on a plate, and expect to whet an agent’s appetite.

So you need to introduce your book in a paragraph or two, and those paragraphs need to have nice tidy prose, and they need to ensure that they’re delivering information on genre, and setting, and anything else that an agent might want to know before she tucks into the manuscript.

And the elevator pitch needs to shimmer behind all that – the gold behind the veil.

So to take that (invented) book about the Victorian circus, my query letter might say.

“Oscar is an orphan. He never knew his father and his mother (a lady’s maid) died when he was eight. For two years, he lived a harsh and semi-feral life on the streets of London, until a kindly trapeze artist at one of London’s largest circuses took him in. His life at the circus is comparatively idyllic until one day, when tasked with clearing out the animal cages, he finds evidence that the lions have recently dined on a human – and, quite possibly, Lady Pamela Dulverton, whose recent disappearance is the talk of the town.

Drawn into the resultant investigation, Oscar is forced to grow up fast – and finally learns family secrets that will change his life forever.”

Now, you can absolutely feel the elevator pitch there: Orphan. Victorian circus. Murder. Boom! That’s a book we want to read. The rest of it (the trapeze artist, the lion’s cages, the status of the murder victim) are all just dressing on top of that basic skeleton. If the murder victim had been trampled by an elephant or tossed from a trapeze or skewered by a strongman, it wouldn’t really affect the story. It would be equally unimportant who took Oscar in. The elevator pitch, however, you can’t alter at all without fundamentally changing the story itself.

Oh yes: and the ‘family secrets that change his life forever’ – that’s also not really part of the pitch. Of course, a YA story has to deliver some major form of life-changing outcome, but it doesn’t have to be a family secret. If an orphan came into money or some form of real job security or decided to set up shop as a freelance investigator, any of those things would also complete the story in the necessary way. The pitch is iron and can’t change (unless you decided to write a different story altogether.)

So, the elevator pitch is all present and correct. The agent will feel its presence.

At the same time, you can feel that the extra dressing just helps the pitch appear at its best. It’s as though your query letter is saying, “Look, our pitch is basically orphan + Victorian circus + murder mystery. You gotta love that, right? But if you want help understanding how those ingredients cohere into an actual story, then let me tell you about Oscar, who …”

So, yes, your elevator pitch needs to light up your query letter – it needs to be felt.

But no, the pitch alone is insufficient.

So do what most of the Feedback Friday people did last wee. Write a fluent paragraph or two. Make sure the elevator pitch is there behind the curtain. And write a paragraph that engages the reader.

It’s that simple.

And don’t stress. If you can write a book that’s good enough to be published, you can definitely write a query letter. (And download the query letter and synopsis builder. It’s good.)

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FEEDBACK FRIDAY

Since we’re doing agent-y things at the moment, we may as well do synopses too.

If you haven’t already posted your query letter for feedback, then I suggest you do that this week here. If you posted your query letter last week, then let’s take a look at your synopsis instead.

I will say that reading back-to-back synopses is a task about as interesting as eating a plateful of brick dust, so I won’t get stuck in too deeply. What I will do, though, is take at least one synopsis from this week’s assignment of Lesson Four of How to Get a Literary Agent and give in-depth comments in the forum for that course (and I’ll make my post sticky, so it’s easy to find.)  

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That’s it from me. Brick dust is yuk, because it lodges between the teeth. A bowlful of gravel though, with fresh milk, and a little grated dandelion? Yum.

Til soon.

Harry

PS: Premium Members have been enjoying our How To Get a Literary Agent course – lessons are released weekly and we’re now on week four, all about how to writing a winning synopsis. The course is free to Premium Members – or you can buy this course as a one-off for £99. But don’t be a silly billy. It makes no sense to buy a one-off course, when you can get an entire suite of courses (and everything else in membership) for just £150 a year (or, for cancel-any-time flex membership, just £30/month.) Membership info here.