Letters are an important part of a writing career and having the perfect letter will get you through places you wouldn’t have imagined. You also need letters in various other scenarios such as replying or sending letters in an official capacity or even to any government agency for various reasons.
One of the most important reasons you need to write letters is for job interviews as well as for various contracts and deals and during these scenarios writing the perfect letter matters the most.
Let us take the scenario wherein you are a new author and you have finished the manuscript of your novel and now you want to approach various publishing houses and therefore the letter you must write is called a query letter.
A query letter is different from other letters because it simply needs to be perfect in order to help close the book deal. In this case, you need to write this letter and have it perfectly edited in order to send it to any agent who is in contact with a publishing house. The publishing house or the agent receives hundreds of letters every month and therefore your letter must stand out from the bunch for any worthwhile expectations.
In this blog, we will tell you the perfect way to get the publishing houses or the company or even the agent’s attention and what are the things you can do to improve this query letter. We will also talk about the various mistakes made by writers and fiction authors in writing this letter.
NOT READING GUIDELINES –
One of the most important things you must keep in mind is following the guidelines of the organization or the agent to whom you are sending this letter. If you make the mistake of not following the guidelines then perhaps your letter will not even pass through the scrutiny of the letter sorter, who will simply neglect your letter and consider it invalid and even dump it in the trash. Even if it passes and reaches the final desk and the concerned authority decides to read the letter and finds out that the guidelines are not being followed then that can tarnish your reputation with that organization forever. People with whom you want to go into business with, generally like seriousness and your way to show sincerity and seriousness would follow the guidelines. Depending upon the place the guidelines may vary.
THE WRITE TONE –
Having the right tone is one of the most important things that you must take into consideration. Many times writers tend to get quite informal and use various literary techniques in the query letter. Let us remind you that this is a no-no. A query letter is what it is, a query letter, and it is a formal document that people read formally and you, therefore, need to keep it as formal as you can without sounding too rigid. You also need to avoid rhetorics, exclamations and any type of wordplay and keep it simple and as direct as possible all the while being respectful. There is also a different side to this and that many authors tend to write the letter too seriously wherein the letter may seem ‘robotic’ and you should avoid that also.
DON’T COPY AND PASTE –
We understand that query letters can be difficult to write and writing a lot of them can be even more difficult since there is a lot to unpack and you must also write it with the utmost attention to the small details. In this scenario, many writers choose to send out the same letters to multiple publishing houses or organizations and agents. There is no harm in this downright however you must not treat your query letter like your curriculum vitae and you must make sure to personalise the letter according to the place you are sending it. Personalising will act as that extra layer on top that will be a deciding factor for your work.
DO NOT BRAG –
This is probably the last thing you would want to do because a perfect query letter should embody humbleness and one of the key aspects should be that you should not trip the fine line between stating your abilities and bragging. If you start bragging in your letter that you are the next JK Rowling then that might be quite off-putting to the person reading the letter and chances are you will get rejected straight away without any second thought. Your query letter should embody humbleness along with a keen sense of passionateness and zeal and commitment to your work.
STAY PROFESSIONAL –
We understand that authors are creative people and however hard they try a bit of creativeness seems to always sneak into anything they write and that is also the case with query letters. You can sneak in a bit of creativity but we suggest that you keep it to the bare minimum. Anything beyond that will not be looked at nicely by the reader. If you are thinking about using funky fonts or different colours or even drawings and illustrations and anything to beautify your letter(excluding illustrations from the book) then we must say one thing, don’t. A query letter is a business letter and you must keep it that way.
DO NOT TRY TOO HARD –
This is one of the most important things you need to keep in mind while writing a query later. You are not here to ask for a favour and they’re not here for charity and you must always keep that in mind. In a query letter you are proposing business and you must have that attitude without being arrogant. Confidence plays a key role in the perfect query letter and you must make sure that you embody the confidence of an author who knows their art well. Trying too hard will make you seem desperate and like in any other scenario in your life showing desperation will not lead you anywhere.
These were a few of the common mistakes that authors make while sending their query letters. If you are someone who is also willing to send their query letter then you must make sure not to repeat these mistakes and also make sure that you are sending it to the right place.
However, the biggest downside to sending query letters is that most of the time, no matter how good your craft is or even how good the query letter is, it gets rejected simply for the fact that traditional publishers have to process a large volume of queries and they can only choose a limited amount to respond to and continue the conversation.
One of the simplest things you can do here is to hire a professional ghost-writing service like ours at Get Best Writers. We are India’s fastest growing ghostwriter for hire agency and we can assist you in writing not only the query letter but also the full book with the help of our experienced ghost-writers no matter the genre.