What the Hell is a Query Letter?

A former Literary Intern breaks it down.

I’ve read a lot of query letters in my time. During the year and a half that I read queries as intern to a literary agent, I’ve seen pretty much every mistake that a writer can make when submitting to an agent.

Some mistakes are simple and banal:

• queries that are long enough to be a novella,
• writers who CC hundreds of agents in a single message,
• writers who mis-gender the agent or misspell their name,
• queries for genres and forms that are wildly outside of the agent’s wheelhouse,
• queries with several typos that could have benefited from spell check or another set of eyes on them,

And then there are the wild ones:

• queries written in rhyming iambic hexameter,
• queries where the writer insists that their book is a work of genius that the agent must represent,
• queries for books that are long enough to send George R.R. Martin running for the hills.
• queries where the writer suggests that the entire Caldecott award committee will be talking about their book over Sunday brunch,
• queries that offer sexual favors in return for…