4 Things They Say In Query Letters And What They Mean
You don't need a decoder ring, or at least you shouldn't need one
Welcome back to the Writer’s Secret Weapon, the newsletter where I, a writing coach for the last 26 years, help you, a writer looking for more than the same old reheated advice so you can be your best creative self.
And today, I’ve got something for those of you aiming for traditional publishing. For those of you not interested in traditional publishing, there’s still something here to pay attention to - the strange phrasings we feel so often like we have to decode in order to understand.
Because today, I want to talk to you about 4 phrases you might see in a rejection letter and why they show up and what they mean, in English, which is how they should be in the first place, but we’ll also talk about why they’re not.
Today, let’s decipher some rejections.
You know what they are, right?
Query letters are a bad idea. They’re just basically an email that got a slight job promotion or it went vegan and it can’t shut up about how it’s saving the environment on a per-mouthful basis.
Why we afford the query letter such a place in traditional publishing is for the very simple reason that traditional publishing is not equipped to work with authors. I know that sounds weird and counter-intuitive, so let me explain.
If they (big giant companies that publish books) didn’t put some hoops and obstacles in the path of writers then the writers wouldn’t realize much traditional publishing just wants to produce any material that sells, and that books are expensive. They’d slap some logo or image on beach towels and key chains if they thought it would move numbers on a spreadsheet, and books are costly to produce and take a lot of time, often too much time for a publisher’s liking.
So enter the middle-person. The agent. The pimp. The person who’s going to take a percentage of the money you’re owed and entitled to just because they gave a pre-approval to your work.
Some things you need to know:
There’s nothing an agent does that you can’t either do yourself (write an email, negotiate, make some calls) or you can’t hire an actual professional editor to do (hi, how are you, nice to see you, thanks for coming).
If the agent were really interested in “putting out good books” they’d be working as a submissions editor for a publisher because then they’d have an objective opportunity to help writers … though they’d be doing that without getting the 7-15% off the top.
As with any parasite, they need the host to keep working and trying and fueling and struggling because once a sale is made, the writer’s slightly less interesting.
Publishers love agents because more hoops between writers and success means a greater illusion of control.
And control is the name of the game here. The query letter is a hoop you jump through that starts the process of you ceding control to an institution that does not, despite lies and social media appearances, care about you as more than the provider of material.
How a query works
A query letter is an artificial hoop insterted into the publishing process where someone starts to insert objective evaluation into your subjective creation. You can’t really escape the bridge building that needs to happen between you making art and them selling a product, but it would be great if they didn’t make the process more complicated through vagary than they do.
Now the excuse they peddle is that an agent can’t possibly read all the submissions they get, which is a lie, because they could, it would just take a long time and would expose most agents as lacking in the skills writers expect them to have: an ability to discern quality, structure, and potential. Sure they can do that in terms of what sells, that’s quantifiable, you can deduce that by seeing what everyone else is making and homogenize accordingly. But the real appreciation of art gets lost as you building that art-to-product bridge. And that loss sucks, because if the process were just slowed down and agents had time to get trained and developed to look at more than sales potential (because the parasite needs to feed), you’d see better books.
The other excuse they peddle is that they’re searching for diamonds in the rough, needles in haystacks, gold among stones. What this romantic notion dismisses is that instead of searching for the gold that needs the least amount of polish en route to market, they could be someone who actually helps a write get better. And this is the point where people bring out anecdotal evidence that they have a great relationship with their agent who helped improve their book, to which I will ask this: did they just fix your mistake after calling it out or have they taught you how to actually craft a better story, and would they do it if there wasn’t 7-15% on the line?
The query is the filter through which the agent seeks gold with the most tolerable work-to-reward ratio. When that ratio is skewed too far, meaning it would take a lot of work over a period of time or with an amount of care that they’re not willing to commit, out fly the rejections.
Rejection, not acceptance, is the principle point of a query. Bat the reader away, train them to some degree of difficulty and discouragement, and they’ll come back again and again to earn your approval. Suddenly you’ve made yourself indispensable, inserting yourself in art because they need to make you happy, some distant parent displeased but you can’t quite figure out why.
And if they told you why then you’d see them for what they really are.
So cue up the vagaries, they say. Pass judgment without explanation and then blame time rather than a process that is dedicated to them trying to sustain relevance.
Let’s take a look at 4 things you might see in a query and not immediately understand. Allow me to translate them.
“This isn’t for what I’m looking for.” / “This isn’t for me.”
Have you ever asked someone what they want to eat and they’ve given you an incredibly unhelpful response like, “I don’t care” or “I don’t know” so you make a choice and then they’re displeased about it? You wanted clarity and got none.
Meet the agent equivalent of not wanting tacos but really wanting sushi and not telling you.
The whole hoopla around things like the MSWL and agent desires is vague on purpose. It’s arbitrary. It’s capricious. It’s built to keep you guessing, not succeeding.
The reason why you get a blanket statement is because being specific about what they want is hard. (Here, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt) And because if they spelled out what they wanted, people would give them what they wanted, which isn’t always what they want. Things equalize when everyone asks for and gets what they want. Relationships are stronger for better communication. But this isn’t a relationship of peers, this is exploitation, this is a top-down power structure, so them being clear isn’t in their best interest.
When you see this phrase in a query, feel free to detach from the remainder of the reply and move on. Your emotional and mental health will thank you.
“I couldn’t connect with the character/the plot/the story.”
Here’s something actually useful, it’s just incomplete. There’s an implied “because…” that you’re left to guess and stress over and it’s this uncertainty that so often leads people to tear everything apart: the query, the first chapter, the whole book, when there’s really one word that needs to be focused on.
Connect.
Whatever the reason that it could be, the absence of connection is fixable. You don’t need to write a whole new and different character or plot or chapter, you need to take the one you have and improve its relatability to the reader.
You’ve got this made up world with its made up people. Maybe there are flying cars. Maybe there are dragons and elves. Maybe it’s just a small town where the boy who dreamt of being a poet falls for a librarian. It’s not that you need to get rid of the cars and dragons and the library, it’s that you need to make them more substantial in their story.
A reader connects better to a character that expresses what they’re thinking and feeling to the same degree (or more) that they express their actions. Go into the character’s head. Write down their thoughts. Write down the reasons why they’re having those thoughts. Write down the emotions of the moment. Write down all the messy internal stuff. Express it, because the reader wants to feel like they’re in the scene, in that moment, right next to the character as they’re doing, saying, thinking, feeling, reacting, or whatever else.
If you need more help with that, good news, I have a video for you right here. I think it’ll help.
“The story doesn’t seem to matter.”
Here again we get the kernel of something actionable, but it’s delivered in the worst way. The key word is matter, and it refers to the stakes of the story, to the way the events of the plot(s) or the arc(s) impact and affect the characters.
What happens in the story should make a difference in the lives of the characters in large and small ways. If you only ever deal in the large ways (like a big hole in the sky opens up and aliens come out) then the smaller effects get lost in the shuffle, even if you spent plenty of time trying to express things about the character or things about the world.
To fix this, you need to understand the stakes of the story. Stakes are one of those things people talk about the story needing but not enough people sit down and explain them, so here’s a video of me sitting down and explaining them.
“The story isn’t speaking to me.”
I saved this one for last because of all four statements you’re likely to see, this one is the most multiple choice.
This could be about connection, like the other statement, just dressed up in slightly personal language to make it sound more empathetic. This will backfire, naturally, because it makes the other person sound a little obnoxious, like a person at a restaurant displeased their soup is a degree off their expected temperature.
But more likely this is someone saying any of the following:
a. The stakes are too low.
b. The story lacks a theme so there’s no real takeaway for the reader beyond seeing made up people do made up things. Here’s a video for that too.
c. There are problems with how you’ve written what you’ve written and it needs a greater investment of time and support than this person is willing to give you - which says more about them than it does about your work, though they won’t make you feel that way.
d. They want to sell something else and don’t know what else to tell you because they don’t want to reveal to you that they’re coming to your art with an agenda.
You and your art deserve better
No, I’m not a fan of traditional publishing. I don’t think you’re a bad person for wanting to be published that way, I think they’re bad people for building and maintaining a system that is classist, racist, sexist, ableist, and exclusionary. I think traditional publishing for a long time was great and good and then as with anything, ran on too long unchanged and became threatened by alternatives and different measures of progress and success.
The dinosaurs were cool until they realized the mammals were a thing and that there were stars in the sky. As with so many parts of life, change is critical and the ability for things adapt while persisting matters. Traditional publishing is not just slow to adapt, they’re resistant to it. They see things like TikTok not as a means of expression but as the newest vehicle for sales and customers. They see social media platforms not just as collections of people with wants, hopes, and dreams, but as numbers on screens that somehow equate to ranking and competition. They don’t get it. They’re not interested in getting it. And for too long they’ve sold so many people the illusion of being the one true way, the best way, knowing that nostalgia and fear will still funnel people through their hoops without question.
You and your art deserve so much better. You deserve any and all opportunities to be heard and seen and read. You deserve a chance to grow and believe in yourself. You deserve a seat at the cool kid’s table. If I were a better marketer this is where I’d quickly swing in a pitch to say I can help you get that seat, but this isn’t about me, this about what you’re doing and what you’re making and where you want to go with it.
So I’m asking you, what do you want to do?
Love you. Talk soon.