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
