I’m going to keep the “how I got my agent” part of this post brief, because I’d rather do a deep dive into a year and a half of query letters, ranging from pretty bad to pretty good. No meandering introductions here; let’s begin!
I already went over my query stats on Twitter, but ultimately, I queried two books: an adult fantasy/western called THE LONE LAW, and an adult fantasy/horror called ROOTBOUND. I shelved TLL when RB was ready to query, and after a few months of that, I got into the DiverseVoices mentorship program, where my mentor suggested swapping to YA. After that, I sent out 18 queries and participated in #DVpit.
The morning after #DVpit, I saw I’d received interest overnight—Chelsea Hensley of kt literary liked one of my tweets, and I rescinded the cold query I’d sent her the night before (lol) and re-submitted. Within a couple of hours, I had a full request, and that evening she asked to set up a call.
Ultimately, Chelsea was my one "yes"! I got a 56% request rate on my post-mentorship queries, so I think my query letter was pretty good by this point. (Having an offer of rep in hand, of course, also helps a lot.)
Before we get to that query, I’m going to show you my first draft of a query ever.
Marley’s first step in her plan to save her country and have her revenge is to become a lawyer. That profession is unknown to Hiherella, and it’s badly needed. Hiherella’s single law—no magic—had not stopped Lord Dalton Heanandorf when he burned Marley’s home to the ground and pilfered the formula for black powder from the ashes.
The dean of a foreign law school offers Marley a deal: if she can take back some books that were stolen off a university caravan, she’s in. The book collection is gathering dust in the library of Lord Heanandorf himself, and stealing from a paranoid man who has an army at his beck and call is far from easy. She'll need help from her friends.
There’s Treda, a High boxer whose only weakness is women; Boz, a drunk card-counter who is always in danger of being burned at the stake; and Shandri and Hana, sisters who came to Hiherella seeking refuge from a land torn asunder by black powder and magic. With them around, Marley reckons they may stand a chance, until Boz twists the simple heist into a way to cripple a tyrant.
Boz is sure that Dalton has conquered the better part of Hiherella by breaking the lone law of the land. He couldn’t care less about getting the books. He’s more interested in a magical artifact Dalton possesses: an orb that shows him every move his enemy makes. Marley wouldn’t trust just anyone’s allegations, but Boz knows his father better than almost anyone.
Every pious Hiherellan citizen steers clear of magic, even Marley with her uncanny sense of smell, but if Dalton is guilty, it would be her duty to expose him as a sacrilegious fraud.
THE LONE LAW is an adult fantasy, with crossover appeal to older teens. It’s as if Leigh Bardugo’s heist crew in SIX OF CROWS got stuck in the mood of Brandon Sanderson’s western fantasy, THE BANDS OF MOURNING. It is the first part of a planned duology. This is my debut novel, complete at 97,000 words.
Now, I’m not going to say much about these queries, because full disclosure, I still feel like I’m terrible at writing them. I’d done a ton of research before writing this query, so I knew mostly how to do the metadata paragraphs, but this is a pretty messy, overly long query. I used r/PubTips as a sounding board to improve my query, and for a while I think my query got worse, because they kept wanting me to focus on the wrong things, but eventually I had something better. When I shelved TLL, the query looked like this:
THE LONE LAW is a 91,000-word adult fantasy novel featuring a diverse ensemble cast—including a bi protagonist written by a bi author—and weird western flair, set in a time before guns but not gunpowder. It is a standalone with series potential.
Marley Roose’s plan to take her country back from the disreputable miser who killed her family starts with a foreign university. When the school offers her admission in exchange for returning a set of historical tomes stolen from them by Dalton Heanandorf—that same murderous miser—Marley is eager to prove her worth and slip in a punch before the real vengeance begins.
She gathers a team: an impulsive boxer, a sneaky musician, an ace archer, and, regrettably, her estranged husband. The trek to Dalton’s manor takes Marley and her crew of misfits across a wild country, governed by a lone unbreakable decree—no magic. Marley’s heretic husband, who uses forbidden magic for tasks as simple as lighting a cigarette, has no qualms with putting them all in danger.
When Marley discovers Dalton is using magic to fuel his territorial expansions, her husband’s magic may become a helpful tool. She reckons she can either leave his sour attitude behind and attempt a quiet heist without him, or use him, and pray his volatility won’t get them all hanged.
THE LONE LAW takes Scott Lynch’s heist crew in The Lies of Locke Lamora and plops them into the western world of Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey. It exudes the romp-like, found-family feel of The Bone Maker by Sarah Beth Durst.
By the end, I was tailoring my comps to the agents and sometimes splitting my metadata paragraph into two parts. Can’t say that was particularly successful, but whatever, I did it. Honestly, I was never wholly satisfied with the query for this book. I did a lot of critiques to help make it better, but it never quite hit right for me. I have at least 50 drafts of this query, compared to ROOTBOUND, where I have no more than 10.
RB’s query ended up pretty damn good, imo. Even my first draft was better than anything I wrote for TLL:
The forest creeps closer to the town of Eldeen every year, and someday soon Eldeen will be consumed. Althea—a young apothecary—doesn’t want that to happen in her lifetime. She’s already lost her mother and brother to the woods; as much as she hates watching her community wither, Eldeen hasn’t seen outsiders in a decade. Althea knows better than to hope.
Then, someone stumbles from the forest, sleep-deprived and carrying his two slumbering companions. Once they wake, Althea learns why they came to Eldeen: to connect the remaining villages of the woods by killing trees along paths. With plant-expert Althea on their side, it’ll be easier to reach another village unscathed. Althea agrees to join them, harboring hope that perhaps in an isolated town, she’ll find her mother and brother.
While traveling, the crew must contend with a forest that wants every human to lay down and sleep forever. The woods, however, have a different fate in mind for Althea. It wants a champion. With the lives of her companions—and her own—at stake, Althea must decide whose cause is more worthwhile: humanity’s, or the forest’s.
ROOTED is a standalone adult horror novel that plays with some familiar fantasy tropes, complete at 76,000 words. It takes the loss of autonomy and romance of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic but adds a sapphic twist, within the deadly forest of M.R. Carey’s The Book of Koli.
You might’ve noticed that ROOTED is a horror/fantasy novel, while ROOTBOUND is a fantasy/horror novel. Early on in querying RB, I got a query critique from an agent, and they had a lot of valuable insights, including my genre swap. Their version of the query—with a few tiny tweaks—is the one that got me through to the end of my journey.
Keeping the apothecary running means eighteen-year-old Althea must work near the woods that devoured her mother and brother fourteen years ago. No one lasts long within the trees, and the chances her family made it to a nearby town are infinitesimal. They’re dead. Althea knows this, as surely as she knows the plants she works with every day.
But when three travelers arrive—the first in a decade—Althea’s hope that her family made it to a nearby town rekindles. To save their tiny township, the travelers are carving paths between the villages of the valley using a new technique that severs trees from their magic, slowly killing them. To the joy of some and the irritation of others, Althea joins the travelers as their botanist, determined to find her family.
On this journey, Althea discovers the more insidious magic of the forest. The woods have always been feared for their obfuscation and strangulation, but the forest begins whispering angrily in Althea’s mind, unhappy with the new woodland paths. It offers her more than her wildest dreams: knowledge about what happened to her family, and magic that will help end humanity’s pain.
All it’ll cost her is letting the woods completely into her head—and killing the crew she’s beginning to love.
And voilà!
I’m not saying any of these are perfect—on the contrary, I think anyone reading with a critical eye would spot things wrong with most of these. Here’s some hope: my first ever response was a full request on the day I started querying; even my early, janky TLL query was good enough for someone. Queries are often obsessed over—I know I was fixated on making mine the best possible version of itself!—and I’m hoping this post will show that a few minor flaws won't ruin your burgeoning writing career. It can be especially hard for us marginalized writers to give ourselves a break, but try not to be too hard on yourself. Querying is really hard and you're doing great!
Would THE LONE LAW have gotten more requests if I wrote a query for it as good as my final one for ROOTBOUND? Who knows; a fantasy/western is a hard sell, AND it had a short prologue (gasp!). Am I going to pretend to be a query master now that I’m out of the trenches? No! I maintain that I suck at queries. If you do too, I think the best thing to do is find the help that works for you and utilize it. Even if your query feels shaky, if your metadata is solid and you establish character and stakes, that can be enough to get an agent to read the pages.
(Not all queries can be THE LIBRARY AT MOUNT CHAR, after all.)
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