The Query Letter that Got Me 5 Agent Offers
Hello, my delicious querying word-nuggets, full of the chickeny goodness of brilliant writing, dipped in the delectable ketchup of resiliance, fortified with the breading of breathtaking effort. May your lunch be dinosaur-shaped and unevenly heated.
(Okay, I’m sorry for that, but I should have never been trusted with a blog.)
It’s finally time for me to share my query letter for Seven Deadly Thorns with you! This letter brought me 16 full requests and 5 agent offers, so I hope it’s helpful.
Dear [Agent],
SEVEN DEADLY THORNS is a 75,000-word YA gothic horror Snow White retelling in which True Love’s Kiss doesn’t resurrect—it kills. It embodies the twisted, enemies-to-lovers romance of Holly Black’s The Cruel Prince and the dark academia and macabre themes of Tim Burton’s Wednesday. It features an unreliable narrator, an enclosed setting, and a ticking clock.
Viola Sinclair, a brilliant student with shadows in her veins, has seven days to live. Bruixas (AKA magic-wielders) are blamed for the death of the King, so when the Queen learns of Viola’s magic, she sends the Huntsman to kill her. However, the Huntsman isn’t just an assassin. He’s Roze Roquelart—fellow student at Vandenberghe School, a prince with a deadly touch, and the person Viola most detests. The Queen marks him with a rose tattoo with seven thorns that disappear one by one, a twisted countdown to when he will have to kill Viola, or face his own death.
Instead of killing her, he bargains with her—if they can find the King’s true killer, they can stop his mother’s bloody tirade, and to keep her safe from the Queen’s wrath, Roze will pretend to court her publicly. As they work together, Viola endures royal pressures and her own confusing feelings for Roze that blur the lines between loathe and love.
But the Queen’s power to create nightmarish monsters grows the more she is feared. In their fight to survive, Roze and Viola will learn that sometimes, to escape the darkness, you must embrace your own.
I’m a recovering middle school English teacher with a BA in English. When I'm not writing, I'm hanging out with my three kids, creating digital art, and pretending every day is Halloween. I also have Tourette Syndrome and am part of the LGBTQ+ family. The magic in SEVEN DEADLY THORNS is a metaphor for queerness and the difficulty I experienced in learning to accept my own identity. Thank you for your time and consideration.
Best,
Amber Hamilton
P.S. CONTENT WARNINGS
- Body horror
- Bugs and snakes
- Claustrophobia
Here are some observations and advice to help you with your own query letter based on what I learned writing this one. As with everything in writing, what worked for me won’t work for everyone, so don’t yeet me off a tower if it doesn’t.
I wrote my query letter (and synopsis) before I wrote the book.
I know, I know—you don’t want to. Believe me, I would rather boil my elbows in a vat of querying tears than write my synopsis most days, but I can’t overstate how much this helped me. As with all writing advice, it won’t work for everyone, but for me it really helped me see the big picture of my manuscript and prevented me from getting off track once I started writing.
The synopsis kept the plot on track. This hugely contributed to producing a tightly-plotted manuscript (a comment that I received from every single offering agent). After writing my first book and hearing feedback that my plot was disjointed and my stakes kept changing, I knew I really needed to focus on having a cohesive plot for Seven Deadly Thorns. Apparently, it worked.
The query letter kept the marketable qualities of my book at the forefront of my writing. Those spooky vibes and the enemies-to-lovers tension were always on my mind when I sat down to draft because I kept my query letter right in front of me.
I binge-listened to The Shit No One Tells You About Writing podcast.
If you’re unfamiliar with TSNOTYAW, you need to get familiar with it. Nothing helped me hone my query letter-writing craft like listening to hours on end of CeCe, Carly, and Bianca critique query letters. After so many episodes, I would play a game where I would try to guess what their criticism was going to be of a letter before they said it.
Their advice is impeccable, and there’s truly nothing that prepares you for writing a query letter like reading a ton of them.
I had critique partners rip my letter to shreds.
Get yourself some writer friends, some who are better than you, who have an agent or who have had some querying success. I had at least half a dozen people analyze my query letter. It’s important that these are the sort of friends who won’t hold back their criticism to make you feel good. You need their advice. Better to feel bad about your letter now than after six months of querying when you realize it’s not working, right?
I kept my letter as bare-bones as possible.
This may be a controversial take, but I’m personally exhausted by query letters that try to be overly creative or contain saccharine greetings. You’ll notice that I didn’t start my letter with “I’m proud to present…” or even “I’m seeking representation for…”.
Why waste words on what the agent already knows? They know you have a book to pitch. They know you’re proud of it. Just cut to the chase. The only pleasantry I included was the essential thank-you.mThe first words of my query letter are the title, and I’m happy with that. That said, I don’t think it’s a huge deal if you just prefer a polite introduction.
What I’m strongly against, however, is trying to be creative with the structure of your letter. I’ve heard of writers writing their query from the POV of their main character, for example. Just don’t. Agents are always tight on time. Assume they’re skimming your letter at midnight on a Wednesday. They’re exhausted and behind in their queries, and they have no other time available to read yours. Do you want that thing reading like a Herman Melville novel? If you’re fortunate enough to have never had to plod your way through Melville, take it from someone who was forced to in college—No, you don’t. That shit will put that agent to sleep, and your amazing manuscript deserves better than a soporific query letter.
You want them to easily be able to find the genre, word count, comps, and hook with minimal effort. Make it easy on them. Keep it tight and to-the-point.
Personalizing wasn’t worth my time.
And it might (hear me, might) not be worth yours either. The query letter that got me my initial offer of representation was sent late one Friday night. I was in a very fuck-it mood about querying in general, and decided to send one off without personalization to an agent. This agent has amazing tastes that definitely deserved a personalized query letter, but they requested the full within a couple hours of me sending the letter without personalization. They offered a week later.
In fact, only one of the five letters that got me offers were personalized. One agent didn’t even see my query letter because she already had my partial from my first book.
Some people really stand behind personalization, and maybe they’re right. Personally, I’ve heard many stories of people saying it made no impact on their request rate or their offers.
So take this advice with a grain of salt. If you want to personalize every query, go for it, but spending 15-30 minutes researching every agent’s bio, sales, and MSWL might not be very effective and gets exhausting when you’re sending out 100+ queries. Consider personalizing your favorites, but not the rest, especially if there’s little to be found about the agent online. It could be worse to come up with a personalization that sounds forced than to just leave it off.
I addressed the agent by their first name.
This is totally my preference, but I have good reason for it. It was tedious trying to hunt down every agent’s salutation, and I had one horrifying incident where I misgendered an agent because their salutation on QueryTracker was wrong. (I apologized—Don’t worry.)
Using a first name is perfectly acceptable. Why risk it?
I included content warnings.
I think nearly every manuscript needs content warnings. When I queried my first book, I was hesitant to include them because I was afraid that the sheer presence of a content warning would scare a lot of agents away. Looking back, I don’t think it would’ve, and it was more important for me to help people who read my work protect their mental health. I’d hate to inadvertently trigger someone who hates snakes. (I’ve made this mistake with my writing friends. Sorry y’all.)
That’s it. If you have questions about my letter or want any advice, feel free to contact me through the blog or DM me on the platform-formerly-known-as-Twitter.
Toodle-loo,
Amber
How I Got Five Agent Offers
I’m writing this post to A) explain why I think my book received so many offers, all from incredible agents, and B) help others in the querying trenches navigate a multiple-offers scenario. I had to learn a whole lot very quickly, and I hope to make you all better prepared than I was.
Is it true? Do I really get to write my How I Got My Agent post? I’ve been waiting so long for this and am currently high-fiving twelve year-old me, who spent family vacations writing in a notebook and checked out books on querying from the library. We did it, kid!
I wasn’t prepared , however, for how this whole thing went down. By the end, I had five agent offers—a scenario that I’d never imagined.
I’m writing this post to A) explain why I think my book received so many offers, all from incredible agents, and B) help others in the querying trenches navigate a multiple-offers scenario. I had to learn a whole lot very quickly, and I hope to make you all better prepared than I was.
If you want to see my exact query stats, you can find them at the end of this post.
But first, the story beats:
In August of 2022, I started querying my first manuscript. I wanted to find something else to write as a distraction from refreshing QueryTracker 492,885,032,083 times a day, and I had an idea that was really sparking. While everything in my wants to share the concept that birthed this book with you, along with the query letter that got me sixteen requests, I’m keeping that info close to the chest for now. I promise I will share it at the right time!
Around December of 2022, I started really putting my back into drafting this book. By March, I was sending it off to beta readers. By mid-April, it was in the trenches. At this time, I’d all but given up on querying my first book. It had gotten a few full requests, but it wasn’t quite anyone’s cup of tea. I had much higher hopes for my second book. I knew I’d written something a lot more solid.
I queried through spring and summer and had a much better full request rate than before. Then in late July, it happened.
One morning, I received a happy little email and promptly started screaming.
I had an incredible meeting with the first offering agent. I sent off my offer notices to the other agents who had my query and was content to endure a slurry of rejections before signing with that agent.
But then I got a full request. And another. And another. Until ten people were reading my manuscript during that two week window, putting my request total at 16.
A week after my first offer, I got another happy little email, asking for a call. Then I got another one while at a Pink Floyd cover band concert on the weekend. Then the week after, I received two more offers in one day.
All said and done, I had five offers on the table. There were even two other agents who asked for an extension of my deadline, but with five offers, it was going to be a difficult enough decision without adding a couple more.
Not in my wildest dreams was this ever going to happen. I’d spent so much time talking myself out of daydreaming about two offers, let alone five!
So why did it get five offers?
The honest answer? I have no friggin clue. I’m honestly shocked. I have some educated guesses. Hopefully, some of this will be helpful to you.
1) I was (sort of) lucky with timing and market.
I happened to write something at the exact moment that it was what editors were hungry for. Chasing trends in general is a fickle strategy, and I don’t recommend it. It’s true what they say—as soon as you finish writing whatever is trending at the moment, the trend will have changed. Plus, I firmly believe in creating art from the heart.
That said, I say I was only sort of lucky because strategy played a part. I’ve really had my eye on publishing for the last couple of years. I read new books in my genre voraciously. I had my notifications set to alert me on agent and editor posts on Twitter, and I was on Twitter and BookTok every damn day. I read manuscript wish lists constantly, and used the handy little feature on manuscriptwishlist.com to search for key words.
In other words, I was informed enough to know intuitively what was hot. So when 2023 began and horror and romantasy jumped in popularity, I already had a manuscript loaded in the cannon.
But it’s not like I just set out to write the most popular thing. I’ve been an emo girl at heart since 2002, my friends, so writing a dark and spooky twist on a fairytale was something I was very excited to do. And romantasy has been truly the genre of my soul since around that same time. This was a story from my heart as much as it was a story written to the market.
My advice here is to keep your ear to the ground with the market and write what you love. The secret is to find the intersection between the two, because I promise there is one. You just have to find it.
2) I plotted this book tighter than Ross’s leather pants.
And agents noticed! Every one of my offering agents made the same comment—this book is tight! A couple of them mentioned that they stayed up into the wee hours of the morning reading it because they had to know what happened next. The pacing never let up.
I kept my word count low—75k for a YA fantasy romance. I didn’t allow myself to keep anything that didn’t absolutely have to be there to move the story forward. I volleyed between physical stakes (Oh no—snakes!) and emotional stakes (Oh no—boys!) and didn’t allow for much else. The result was a very pretty skeleton of a book to which an agent, and subsequently an editor, could suggest adding whatever meat they wanted.
That was the top (and sometimes the only) editorial feedback I received from both agents who offered and who didn’t—that it needed more meat. On more than one phone call, I smiled to myself when I heard that feedback, because it was completely intentional. I knew it needed meat. I very much suspect that had I written more, I wouldn’t have had as many agents request or offer. I wanted them to read it imagining what it could become, how they could help add color, instead of figuring out what needed cutting.
I’d like to go into a lot more detail about this with suggestions for how to plot tightly, but I think it would be a whole other blog post. Let me know if that’s something you’d read, and I’ll write it!
3) The romance and spook were strong with this one.
This may also be another blog post in the future, because there is clearly more to writing spooky, swoony books than what I can say in a couple of paragraphs. But since this was the other piece of consistent, positive feedback I received, I wanted to mention it.
I love writing pining, enemies-to-lovers, and toxic, over-the-top love. It’s my bread and butter. My best and briefest advice here is to read what you write and reflect on why you love it. If you write romance like me, who’s your favorite book boyfriend? What makes them so great? Cardan Greenbrier was a big inspiration for this particular male love interest. I loved Cardan’s elegance and brutality in The Cruel Prince by Holly Black, so that’s what I went for. Then I gave my hopeless lovebirds a strong reason they couldn’t be together, because nothing creates longing like forbidden love.
As for the spook, my best explanation for writing this well is that I’m an easily frightened person. The last scary movie I saw was Paranormal Activity, and I walked out of that movie theater and said, “Hell no. I am never doing that again.” I know what keeps me up at night, so that’s what I wrote.
I also learned a lot about writing horror due to my book club forcing me to read The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires. That book scared the bejeesus out of me, but after I put it down, I marveled at Grady Hendrix’s ability to describe scary things in such graphic detail that I could barely hold the book while reading. My spouse got a big kick out of watching me read that book—crouched in my armchair, literally squealing in terror, unable to tear my eyes away from the page. I tried to imitate Hendrix’s style using the classic spooky elements found in gothic literature, and my scary scenes were born.
But Amber, you say, I did all that, and I still don’t have an agent. I hear you. I think querying is like climbing Mount Everest only to try your luck in the casino at the top. You do everything right and still have to shelve a book (or several). It’s not right. It’s not fair. And sometimes the only reason one person makes it and not another is dumb luck.
But I firmly believe that publishing is a matter of when and not if, as long as you keep going. Self-care, tenacity, and a network of supportive writer friends will get you through (I see you, #TeamPitchNBitch).
So I had my five agent offers. What now?
Trust me when I say that I was dramatically underprepared for that scenario. I talked to many people during that two-week period and learned a lot about navigating multiple offers. Here’s what I learned:
Know what you want in an agent. Write down your priorities. Then number them!
It would have been a lot easier if there had been just one agent that was a strong choice, but what do you do when every agent who offers is a strong choice? What if all of them are great people with decent sales and stellar reputations?
You look at your priorities.
What are you optimizing for? Try treating it like those fun TikTok bracket effects that force you to choose the best Disney prince or the best Taylor Swift album. The great thing about these is that it forces you to decide between two good things.
One agent might be Hercules—they would jump into the swirling death waters of the underworld for you and your book. But another is Aladdin—they have quite a reputation, and they can show you the world! One agent is Folklore—everyone loves them, and for good reason. They’re cozy and will calm your nerves during those inevitably difficult weeks on submission. But another is Reputation—they’re making deals and taking names from their snake-y throne, and they’ll fight for that one dollar bill in the bathtub for you.
Point is, think about how you’re going to navigate several amazing choices. Here are some questions to help guide you:
Do you want a shot at making it really big, or would you rather have an agent that isn’t as big of a name, but who understands you and your work really well?
Do you want to write full-time or are you happy with a day job and making some dessert money with your writing?
How much hand-holding do you want through the submission process?
Who has connections with the imprints you like?
How have they sold in other genres that you might want to move into?
Who has the ability to give you the best editorial feedback for you?
See? Tricky. But figure out your priorities now, and hopefully it will be easier for you than it was for me. Personally, I had about twenty-four hours to figure out that my top priority is the longevity of my career. I want to spend my life writing, and I want to do it as much as possible. So I chose the best agent to help me do that.
Make connections with whisper networks.
After you have the call, you’ll hopefully get a chance to speak with some clients of the agent. But if you have connections with other writers, you will also hopefully know someone who knows someone who’s also a client or who has interacted with this agent in the past.
An agent will probably give you contact info for their happiest clients, which makes total sense. The real test is if the whisper networks also have good things to say about the agent. I found people through Twitter rooms and r/pubtips on Reddit.
Not every criticism of an agent is valid, but many are. So think critically and learn as much as you can about your source.
Get a dose of delusional self-confidence.
The ancient proverb rings true—carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre white man.
I had a conversation in the last few weeks with one of my now-agent’s clients in which we somehow ventured from talking about the agent to talking about navigating publishing as a writer. In the most encouraging way possible, they called me out for what they termed a “debut author mentality.” I didn’t really believe I’d be a successful writer. I was used to scraping the bottom of the barrel for an ounce of agent attention, and now suddenly, agents were in my inbox, and I was evaluating them. Do these fancy New York agents know that I’m just some chick in Texas with a laptop and a dream?
Here’s the thing—querying tricks us into thinking we’re worse at what we do than we are. Piles and piles of rejections have put our expectations so low they’re practically nailed to the floor. But you gotta pull up those nails, baby. Let that confidence skyrocket.
Thinking that an agent is somehow doing you a favor by offering on your book is silly. No one is doing this because they’re just that nice—they look at you and see dollar signs. You know how many queries are in their inbox, and they chose you. That makes you super effing talented!
You need to know this if you’re going to make the decision that’s best for your career. The people pleaser in you might feel like you’re asking too many incessant questions in agent interviews or are being too strict about evaluating them. But remember, you are the engine that keeps publishing going. Without writers, there are no books.
I was woefully underprepared to get five offers because I didn’t believe I was good enough for that to ever happen. So lesson learned—humility is overrated. Know your worth.
And that’s the encouragement I’ll leave you with—you are a badass writer. That agent might be Folklore, but you are the Eras Tour. They might be a Prince Eric, but you’re fucking Elsa, and everyone wants to be you. You are a Bronte-esque book bard, a top shelf ink-pusher, an absolute savant of the written word. Believe in your books, you incredible Word Witch.
Much love,
Amber
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Total Queries Sent: 91
Rejections: 59
Total Requests: 16
Partial Requests: 2
Partials that Turned into Fulls: 1
Offers: 5