Short version

There’s no such thing.

Long version

Let’s stipulate the following:

  • You have written a novel-length manuscript.
  • You love the story, its characters, and its theme(s).
  • Your beta readers enjoyed reading the early drafts.
  • Your manuscript has benefitted from their feedback.
  • Editing and proofreading have refined it to the point where you’re ready to share it with the world.
  • You are willing to share the fruits of your labor with a publisher in exchange for access to their considerable talents and resources.

That last point means you’re not done writing. For myriad reasons, publishers won’t invest their talents and resources in just any story. It is up to you to convince them that investing time, sweat, and tears in your story will help keep their lights on and put their kids through college. This expectation is absolutely fair. In a world of infinite bandwidth, every publisher would read every manuscript and judge the stories holistically. Ours is not a world of infinite bandwidth. Far from it. Publishers have a very finite amount of time to choose which stories to they want to add to the catalog that they will offer to the millions of potential readers. The 21st Century publishing ecology is inhabited by an astounding number of writers. So many that the publishers have retreated behind a layer of literary agents. The agents filter out the noise of unready, unreadable, and unmarketable manuscripts. They use their industry knowledge to route promising stories to receptive publishing house editors. Before your manuscript is seen by an editor, you must convince an agent to represent it. In our world of finite bandwidth, an agent will not judge your story by reading your manuscript from start to finish. That’s where the additional writing comes in.

In Hollywood, they call it a pitch, as in sales pitch. The pitch may take one of many forms. It may summarize the story. It may highlight the emotional journey. For a character-driven story, the pitch may focus on the fascinating people rather than the plot. It might try to sell the story by comparing to hit movies. “It’s Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman!” A key feature of a movie pitch is that it’s much shorter than the actual movie.

The literary world sees itself as more dignified than Hollywood. You don’t pitch a book. That would be vulgar. You ever-so-politely submit a query.

“Would you be interested in representing this story?”

The thing is, the query is essentially a pitch. You have one page to sell the agent on your story and yourself. This may seem brutally arbitrary and capricious, but it is also a rather elegant solution to several problems. The fixed length enables the agent to budget her query reading time reliably. The brevity provides a quick test of the author’s writing skill, not unlike a whiteboard coding problem in a software job interview. Abiding by constraints of the query hints at the writer’s ability and willingness to function within the commercial literary system. The query letter is a lossy compression scheme that folds information beyond “what’s the story about?” into the agent’s input in a digestible format.

There are innumerable books, magazine articles, blog posts, online communities, and services that offer recipes and coaching to help your write a great query letter. By studying the common features of several prominent such sources, I produced what I thought was a worthy query letter. A couple of rounds of revision with an industry professional produced a better take on my original and an alternate query that the pro recommended. I had two viable query letters. At the very least, I could deploy both in a form of A/B testing. Over time, I might learn which, if either, got better results. That was something. Right?

Yes, that was something. Something, but not enough. I researched literary agencies and discovered that that even within a given agency, individual agents might be looking for different things in a query. The query gurus counsel that to be appealing, your query should be seasoned to the taste of the given agent. The actual requirements amount to distinct recipes. In some cases, the recipes are prescriptive enough to cross the threshold from cooking into baking. My two polished queries were a good start, but they are ultimately just raw ingredients.

In Seanworld, queries would be XML documents whose schema encompasses the full range of the publishing industry’s requirements. Authors would populate the document with word count, a short biography, contact information, back cover text, synopses of various lengths, agent-specific text, the manuscript, and whatever other metadata the industry might be interested in. Software on the agent’s end would display only what the agent needed to see to make her decision.

In the real world no such schema exists. Agents operate from personal experience and taste. They set their requirements accordingly. The first step pleasing an audience of readers with your story is pleasing an agent with a bespoke query. Such is the path of traditional publishing that I have set out to explore.