Episode 028 - Writing the Killer Query with Kelly Simmons
May 26, 2020
Kelly Simmons reviews the three core rules of writing a successful query--keep it short, don’t sound like an asshole, and don’t become an automatic no--and shares guidance on how to make your query stand out in a busy agent's inbox (including emojis!).
Kelly Simmons is a former journalist, an advertising creative director, and the author of five novels: Standing Still, The Bird House, One More Day, The Fifth of July, and Where She Went. Her sixth novel, Not My Boy, comes out January 2021. She teaches in the Drexel University MFA program, and is a member of Women Fiction Writers Association, Tall Poppy Writers, and The Liars Club, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping fledgling novelists. Additionally, she co-helms the weekly writers podcast “Liars Club Oddcast.” And she was born the same day as Dorothy Parker. Coincidence? She thinks not.
"They want to represent a professional writer, and every clue that you can give them that you are a pro counts and reading and following the business and tracking what agents are having sales and success is a form of saying, 'I am serious.'"
Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is Kelly Simmons. Hey, Kelly, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] Kelly: Thank you, Matty. Thanks for having me.
[00:00:09] Matty: It is my pleasure. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you, Kelly Simmons is a former journalist and advertising creative director and the author of five novels: Standing Still, The Bird House, One More Day, The Fifth of July, and Where She Went. And I have read several of those and love them all, so I can highly recommend all of Kelly's books. Her sixth novel, Not My Boy, comes out in January of 2021. She teaches in the Drexel University MFA program, and is a member of the Women Fiction Writers Association, Tall Poppy Writers, and The Liars Club, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping fledgling novelists. Additionally, she co-helms the weekly writers podcast, Liars Club Oddcast, and she was born the same day as Dorothy Parker. Coincidence? She thinks not so.
[00:01:02] Kelly, welcome again, and our topic today is going to be writing the killer query and you have become known as the Query Queen. Let's start out by explaining how you got to be the Query Queen.
[00:01:16] Kelly: Well, I should point out that I have given myself the title.
[00:01:23] Matty: That's the best way to get a title, is to give it to yourself.
[00:01:26] Kelly: Well, it became kind of a joke with the Liars Club group because I felt like that was where I could help people the most. And whenever anyone had a question at the coffee house--we run these monthly coffee house mentoring groups-- so over the years, all heads would just turn to Kelly. So I started calling myself the Query Queen as a joke and people started repeating it. But I've helped a lot of people and I felt like I wanted to devote myself to something I could do to help all authors in a small way, something I could almost always say yes to, because authors, when they're starting out, they're struggling in so many different ways, and to help someone with a manuscript is such an enormous task, but I felt like I really understood how to help people once they had a package of work done and once they were submitting it because I'd had a lot of luck myself. I felt very assured as to why I was better at it than others. And it had to do with my advertising background, which was very foreign to most people in the world of academics, a lot of writers come out of that. Short form writing is very foreign to those people. So, I thought I could help them with the short forms.
[00:02:43] Matty: Before we dive into writing the killer query, I wanted to address a question that I expect people will ask, which is, why is a podcast called The Indy Author addressing a topic that is so closely associated with the traditional publishing world?
[00:03:00] And I really have three reasons for that. One is that I think more and more authors are not thinking of that as an either / or decision. So many authors are looking at both, maybe choosing different paths for different books or different series depending on what they want to get out of that piece of work.
[00:03:16] The second is that I think people need to bring an indy mindset regardless of where they're published. If they want to be successful from a business point of view, they need to approach it with that indy mindset. And the third reason, and this is the one, Kelly, I'm hoping you'll weigh in on, is that, especially because you had mentioned how valuable your advertising background has been, even if someone is saying, well, I'm never going to write a query letter that I'm going to send to an agent or an editor or a publishing house, nonetheless, those authors are still going to be pitching to someone. They're going to be pitching to bookstores to carry their books. They're going to be pitching to libraries to carry the books. They're going to be pitching to readers to read the books. So before we dive in, can you talk a little bit about how transferable what we're going to be talking about is to other kinds of queries or pitches than a traditional query letter?
[00:04:07] Kelly: It's really true because you are doing nothing but writing query letters your whole career. The most important one might be to a publisher or to an agent, but there are lots of other important ones. You're writing to ask people for blurbs. I recently had someone very unexpected agree to blurb my work, and my publisher said, I know it's because of that letter that you wrote. She laughed hysterically at the letter, and the letter is really based on a lot of the things that I put into my query thoughts. So, whenever you are writing an email to anyone with a synopsis in it, you are writing a query letter for sure. And you do it as an author a million times, to libraries, to bookstores, to people you want to blurb. If you're submitting a proposal for a book fair panel, you're writing a query letter. So you have to get used to shortening your thoughts and condensing them and containing what your book is about in a really small form. Always.
[00:00:06] Kelly: Thank you, Matty. Thanks for having me.
[00:00:09] Matty: It is my pleasure. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you, Kelly Simmons is a former journalist and advertising creative director and the author of five novels: Standing Still, The Bird House, One More Day, The Fifth of July, and Where She Went. And I have read several of those and love them all, so I can highly recommend all of Kelly's books. Her sixth novel, Not My Boy, comes out in January of 2021. She teaches in the Drexel University MFA program, and is a member of the Women Fiction Writers Association, Tall Poppy Writers, and The Liars Club, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping fledgling novelists. Additionally, she co-helms the weekly writers podcast, Liars Club Oddcast, and she was born the same day as Dorothy Parker. Coincidence? She thinks not so.
[00:01:02] Kelly, welcome again, and our topic today is going to be writing the killer query and you have become known as the Query Queen. Let's start out by explaining how you got to be the Query Queen.
[00:01:16] Kelly: Well, I should point out that I have given myself the title.
[00:01:23] Matty: That's the best way to get a title, is to give it to yourself.
[00:01:26] Kelly: Well, it became kind of a joke with the Liars Club group because I felt like that was where I could help people the most. And whenever anyone had a question at the coffee house--we run these monthly coffee house mentoring groups-- so over the years, all heads would just turn to Kelly. So I started calling myself the Query Queen as a joke and people started repeating it. But I've helped a lot of people and I felt like I wanted to devote myself to something I could do to help all authors in a small way, something I could almost always say yes to, because authors, when they're starting out, they're struggling in so many different ways, and to help someone with a manuscript is such an enormous task, but I felt like I really understood how to help people once they had a package of work done and once they were submitting it because I'd had a lot of luck myself. I felt very assured as to why I was better at it than others. And it had to do with my advertising background, which was very foreign to most people in the world of academics, a lot of writers come out of that. Short form writing is very foreign to those people. So, I thought I could help them with the short forms.
[00:02:43] Matty: Before we dive into writing the killer query, I wanted to address a question that I expect people will ask, which is, why is a podcast called The Indy Author addressing a topic that is so closely associated with the traditional publishing world?
[00:03:00] And I really have three reasons for that. One is that I think more and more authors are not thinking of that as an either / or decision. So many authors are looking at both, maybe choosing different paths for different books or different series depending on what they want to get out of that piece of work.
[00:03:16] The second is that I think people need to bring an indy mindset regardless of where they're published. If they want to be successful from a business point of view, they need to approach it with that indy mindset. And the third reason, and this is the one, Kelly, I'm hoping you'll weigh in on, is that, especially because you had mentioned how valuable your advertising background has been, even if someone is saying, well, I'm never going to write a query letter that I'm going to send to an agent or an editor or a publishing house, nonetheless, those authors are still going to be pitching to someone. They're going to be pitching to bookstores to carry their books. They're going to be pitching to libraries to carry the books. They're going to be pitching to readers to read the books. So before we dive in, can you talk a little bit about how transferable what we're going to be talking about is to other kinds of queries or pitches than a traditional query letter?
[00:04:07] Kelly: It's really true because you are doing nothing but writing query letters your whole career. The most important one might be to a publisher or to an agent, but there are lots of other important ones. You're writing to ask people for blurbs. I recently had someone very unexpected agree to blurb my work, and my publisher said, I know it's because of that letter that you wrote. She laughed hysterically at the letter, and the letter is really based on a lot of the things that I put into my query thoughts. So, whenever you are writing an email to anyone with a synopsis in it, you are writing a query letter for sure. And you do it as an author a million times, to libraries, to bookstores, to people you want to blurb. If you're submitting a proposal for a book fair panel, you're writing a query letter. So you have to get used to shortening your thoughts and condensing them and containing what your book is about in a really small form. Always.
read more ...
[00:05:18] Matty: A couple of episodes ago I had Brian Meeks on talking about writing book descriptions and he brought exactly the same perspective because his position, and he also was using proven advertising-related theories in his book descriptions, is that he even writes his Facebook posts based on the same formula that he uses for book descriptions, and so it's all transferable to many different environments.
[00:05:42] Kelly: And you see it all the time. There are people who write brilliant, brilliant books, and their social media is horrible, because they can't go from the long form to the short form.
[00:05:53] And it's pretty easy to learn. You don't have to know everything about it. You don't have to go back to school and become an advertising veteran. Once you get it condensed down, then you can reuse it. I mean, an elevator pitch or a theme line for your book, all those smaller things are useful and they can actually guide you in the writing of a book.
[00:06:13] I know a few writers keep their elevator pitch pinned to their computer on a sticky note. It helps guide you as to what the final effect that you want the reader to have.
[00:06:27] Matty: Brian and I talked about the idea of writing your book description before you write the book, because that's the point at which you have that overarching sense of the tone and the major characters and the theme, but you're not so bogged down. And I imagine the same could be true of query letters.
[00:06:45] Kelly: Yes. I think Brian and I should go on the road. We should pitch a tent.
[00:06:49] Matty: I think you should. I'll do an introduction.
[00:06:54] So the approach we're going to use for this is that Kelly graciously provided a before and after query letter so that I didn't have to use my own query letter.
[00:07:03] Kelly: You're afraid.
[00:07:05] Matty: Yeah. Well, I wrote a query letter last year. Speaking of being a hybrid author, I'm sending a book around with a query letter, but it's already been edited so many times, I was scared to use it for this one because I just can't go back to it anymore. I've gotten too much input.
[00:07:20] But you were nice enough to provide one where the names have been changed to protect the innocent, if this was based on an actual letter. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to read through this before version and then we're going to talk about how that might not be the most effective way of approaching someone. So here's the before version.
Dear Agent,
My book is about a woman who, feeling guilty in her role in a murder--a murder that her daughter witnessed--runs to her mother's house and tries to explain. Feeling the only option is to hide, she decides to leave her parents behind and run away. First arriving in Iowa to stay with a quirky farmer, then moving on to Minnesota where she thinks about setting up housekeeping with a local librarian and begins to date over her daughter's objections, and ultimately settling in California where she finds a job in a bakery while still attempting to evade the law.
The title is Where Jane Goes, and it's complete at 90,000 words.
I spent the last year writing it while juggling my responsibilities as a stay at home mom. I would love for you to represent it.
Sincerely,
Author
[00:08:24] So what do you think?
[00:08:26] Kelly: Well, I purposely picked something that had a number of flaws, and most query letters that people read to me at the coffee house or send to me through Drexel or wherever do not have this many sins in it. But a lot of them are common. This particular example has four sins in it. The first problem is the book description, right? Leading with the book description, which I do recommend people do if they feel that they don't have a strong thing to lead with.
[00:08:59] This book description breaks every good example by being one that just says, and then, and then, and then, and then. It's like a seven-year-old telling you a story. They just go on and on, or someone describing their dream to you.
[00:09:14] So rather than being more global about what happens in the book and rising above and talking about the lead character's journey, people go into subplots, people make them too long. In this case, it just sounds like a drive through different states.
[00:09:33] Matty: A travelog.
[00:09:34] Kelly: Exactly.
[00:09:35] So that's mistake number one.
[00:09:36] Mistake number two, which is actually a very common mistake, we talk about the section I call "why me?" Why should you represent me? What's the most unique thing about you in the agent or the publisher's mind? And I hear this all the time. "There's nothing unique about me." "I'm retired." "I'm a stay at home mom." "I have no experience." And then when you tease it out, you find that people do have some experience usually, or I tell them to make light of the fact that they have no experience or to use the fact that they have no experience. So, she makes a classic mistake in assuming that they are going to be interested in the fact that she's a stay at home mom.
[00:10:16] And she gives no reason for the "why you" section--why that particular agent is a good choice for her. The opening is flat. The opening is most important part of any letter because people don't always make it past the opening.
[00:10:33] Matty: Let me just mention the three rules. I'm going to provide a link to this article that I'm reading from that Kelly wrote about queries, and I'll just bang through, first of all, the three rules of queries, and you can make any additional comments you want to make about the ones they may have violated in that example.
[00:10:52] Kelly: Yes. The overarching rules.
[00:10:53] Matty: Yup. So the first rule is keep it short. Do you think that that example violated the keep it short just based on length?
[00:11:00] Kelly: No. That's the one thing it doesn't do. It is short enough.
[00:11:04] Matty: Okay. And the second rule is don't sound like an asshole. I don't know that this person really sounded like an asshole, but it sounded boring.
[00:11:15] Kelly: It's boring. It's boring and she doesn't give herself enough credit. Most queries that I see are the reverse. The sound like an asshole rule is for people that say, "My book is a mashup between Salman Rushdie and, Ken Kesey." You know, you would be shocked, shocked how many really nice, really talented, humble people that I meet in person send me queries that make them sound like they are the next John Irving. And I'm like, "Dude, you can't do that. You can't do that."
[00:11:50] Matty: I think it's interesting because I suspect people are doing that because they have internalized the fact that this is an advertising effort, and they think, "Oh, well, I know advertising. Advertising is always about the advertiser saying how fabulous their product is." So what's the difference in the mindset you have to bring so that you're selling your product, but you're not sounding like an asshole.
[00:12:13] Kelly: Right. That's a very good point. You don't want to overdo anything, right? You want to provide just enough color and just enough thinking and well-written -ness in your letter so that people think that you are a pro and that you know the business, versus just throwing things at the wall and being grandiose. No one is a combination of Ken Kesey and Salman Rushdie. Those are not current examples. I always tell people to make it about the work and not about the person, right? Not who you are, but your work has echoes of.
[00:12:55] And to not pick people who are perennial bestsellers because you have more in common with someone just starting out. So I ask them to look for a current examples of books that were published recently and to think of that second tier of author, not the first tier.
[00:13:15] Matty: What would you consider "recently"?
[00:13:17] Kelly: The last five years. And I'm telling you, no one does that unless people are really smart and have gone to a bunch of writers conferences and have really gotten a lot of advice from people. People who may be perfectly good writers, but who aren't as savvy about the business, they always pick big classic names, from people who can do no wrong. It doesn't matter if you write like John Grisham, you know what I mean? John Grisham can do no wrong. People compare themselves to the Outlander series. Well, again, she can do no wrong. And it may be that the agent or the publisher does see that in you, but if it's not leavened with a little bit of humility. they'll take a look at the first page and say, "Okay, no, that's not her."
[00:14:03] Matty: The third rule is don't become an automatic no. At what point in that before letter did that become an automatic no?
[00:14:13] Kelly: That is such a good question, Matty. And I think it's right away because the book description is terrible, so she unwittingly leads with one of the weakest parts. There's actually no strengths in the letter, but you're going to lead with your book description. It has to be a very vivid and well-written book description. And a lot of people do lead with their book description because they don't feel that they have a personal connection to lead with.
[00:14:42] Because those are the other things I recommend. Do you have a connection to that person? Have you met that person before? Do you have a friend in common? Those should always be in the lead. If you are a professional or you have some sort of interesting connection to your material, like you're an expert in something about your book or your career is tied to something in your book, I always feel that that should possibly be the opening, because it differentiates you. If you're an Ivy league graduate or if you have an MFA from a prestigious place, honestly, that has to be woven in very, very early because it does provide a bit of color that registers with people.
[00:15:23] So, a lot of times people put that lower, and it's like, if I don't get there, if I don't see that you went to Harvard and got straight A's, it doesn't matter.
[00:15:34]
[00:15:34] Matty: I'm guessing that this became a no at about word five, after "My book is about ..."
[00:15:41] Kelly: "My book is about." Yup.
[00:15:42] She also did not name her genre. She told us how long the book was. Some agents say they want to know that because they want to know that you are a professional. They want to know that you haven't written a 160,000-word novel. But honestly, you can know so much about a person without knowing the word count, by how well-written their book description is.
[00:16:07] Matty: So would your advice about facts like somebody having gone to Harvard or being a straight A student, would that vary depending on the content of the book they're pitching?
[00:16:18] Kelly: Yes. And straight A's in the young might be helpful, but I guess the most important thing is that if you have a connection to the book that is unusual.
[00:16:34] Matty: I know you having just written a book about the college life, then that would be very applicable in that circumstance. So we've been tormenting people with the bad version. And, fortunately I have the after version and Kelly, I don't know if you have this and would like to read it or you would like me to read it.
[00:16:51] Kelly: It's totally up to you. I have it here.
[00:16:53] Matty: Yeah. If you have it there, please go ahead.
[00:16:55] Kelly: And then we can talk about why it's better.
Dear Agent,
When my family drives me insane, I sometimes consider killing them. Then I realized it's probably better to work these things out in fiction. So for the past 10 years, when everyone's asleep, I've honed by ability to write women's commercial fiction, and I've just completed my first novel, There Jane Goes, which I'd love for you to represent.
Jane Morgan's biggest problem wasn't that she'd just committed a murder. It was that her daughter witnessed her doing it. My novel follows Jane on a year-long cross-country fugitive flight as she turns their lives into a bigger adventure and helps her daughter forget the unforgettable.
It's contemporary women's fiction with thriller elements: Anne Tyler crossed with Anne Rice. I hope you'll agree to read the work of a crazy housewife. I've heard you've had some wonderful sales in my genr--yes, we've been talking about you on Twitter--and I look forward to sending you more pages. I'll follow up in two weeks.
Sincerely yours,
Crazy in Cleveland, AKA Joan Robbins.
P.S. Did I mention my best friend is a publicist and will help me for free? No? Okay. Well, she is.
[00:18:05] Matty: That's a pretty clear difference between the before and after examples.
[00:18:09] Kelly: Yeah. I wanted to give you something that would definitely pop, but it illustrates what you can do with basically nothing.
[00:18:17] I mean, she doesn't have any special skills as a novelist, except the ability to write about being a novelist, you know? She's written about her book in a much more contained, interesting, vivid way, by describing it as a cross-country, fugitive flight, rather than saying she goes on the road and then goes to her mother's house and then goes to ... so parts of it are condensed.
[00:18:44] And it's a good description, even though she uses classic authors--by blending them, it sounds new. Anne Tyler crossed with Anne Rice sounds fresh and different. She names her genre. But she opens with something completely unusual, that she's basically a housewife with an imagination, and she proves it by writing a good letter.
[00:19:06] The other thing she does, and I tell people to do this all the time, is to put a P.S. at the end of their letter, because P.S.s are the second most commonly read piece of a letter, even though they're at the bottom, because your eye just goes to something that's after the end.
[00:19:22] So she pulls out another piece of information and puts it there in a nice way. To me, this is an example of a classic but unusual letter because the writer doesn't have a lot of the elements most people do. Most people have some experience writing. Most people have something to say about their academic career. Most people have something interesting about their book. Maybe that's their research. Research shows that you're serious. Research gives you story angles. And an editor or an agent is thinking about those things. And those are things that people don't realize are important.
[00:19:59] They think it's all about the book because the agent always says, "Oh, it's all about the book." So they write this long, wide description of their book, that proves that they can't talk about their book.
[00:20:14] Matty: What would the subject line be of this after version?
[00:20:17] Kelly: I'm trying to think what it was. It was good. It had an emoji in it, which I also tell people to consider, which horrifies people. It just depends. The person reading this is going to be a very young person. It's someone's assistant who is used to looking at emojis.
[00:20:37] Kelly: It was something like "Writing versus Killing, Which Should I Do?" And then it had a pen emoji or something. It had a question mark, which sometimes is a useful ploy. But the subject line of the email is very important as well.
[00:20:51] And the subject line can be an automatic no. An automatic no can be spelling the agent's name wrong. Sending something that's outside of the genres that they have clearly indicated they want is an automatic no. It's like addressing the children's book librarian when you write adult. Whoever your letter's going to, it has to address that person's needs, not your own. So that's an easy mistake to make, no matter what kind of letter you are writing.
[00:21:18] Matty: Will your query letter be in someone's email box along with a lot of other email, so that if you were to write, "Should I write or should I kill," something along those lines, is there a danger that it's going to not be apparent that it's a query letter and get sent to their spam folder, or are the emails that you're sending query letters to pretty much dedicated to query letters?
[00:21:42] Kelly: Sometimes, agents have several emails and sometimes they'll tell you what they want the query line to be in their submission guidelines. And I always say, you have to follow the agent's submission guidelines first because if they say they want this to be the subject line and they want this to be the opening and they want so many pages attached, you have to listen to them. Because they'll be mad if you don't listen to them. So you have to put my advice aside.
[00:22:08] But what's more likely to go to spam is something that says "free" or "exciting" or something that sounds sexual. I mean, there are certain words that you use that sound like you're trying to sell someone, like I give the example of "Viagra for the mind." No, no, no, no. It goes straight to spam.
[00:22:30] Matty: Yeah. As well it should.
[00:22:32] Kelly: Lots of exclamation marks are a problem also. Anything like that. So I do have in my book guidance about going into spam too. But, yeah, sometimes they want the word query in it. Sometimes they don't.
[00:22:44] But if you have a hundred queries in your inbox, which agents tell me all the time that they do, something that has an emoji in it or something that has a slightly different word in it is going to stand out for sure.
[00:22:58] Matty: Just so that people who aren't able to look at the article themselves know what the sections are, there are seven sections of the query letter: the email subject line, the all-important opening, the book description, the why me, the why you, the call to action, and the P.S. We've talked a little bit about the email subject line. Any other comments about the all-important opening?
[00:23:25] Kelly: Yeah, that is where people really have to bring it. Even if you ignore everything else that I say, you have to nail your opening. And that is always either a great book description or something interesting about the writer or about the writer's connection to the material, just 100%. Or a connection between the agent and the writer. That has to go first. Doesn't matter how good your book is, if there's some interesting thing that connects you to that person, that has to go in the opening for them to go further. And most people's openings are weak.
[00:24:03] Matty: In this case, the after example combines the opening and the why me aspect.
[00:24:09] Kelly: Yes.
[00:24:10] Matty: Because you're combining that "My family drives me insane. I sometimes consider killing them," is a pretty gripping opening, and then the explanation about "it's probably better to work these things out in fiction," and for the past 10 years she's been writing is the why me portion of that.
[00:24:24] Kelly: Correct. Most people's letters follow a very staid format: "Dear so and so, I am writing to you because I admire you." And they flatter the agent right off the bat. Or they go right into themselves right off the bat: "I'm writing to you because I just wrote a blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." Or "I'm writing to you because you are great." And both of those things are very ordinary. Their eyes have to go straight to the next paragraph. It's always a mistake to be boring when you're trying to stand out in an inbox of a hundred or 200 other entries.
[00:24:57] Matty: How do you balance the "not flattering" with the "why you" section?
[00:25:02] Kelly: It's fine to flatter them, but it has to make sense for your book. So you'd have to say something like, "I admire the job that you've done for so-and-so." And that so-and-so should be someone in your genre or someone aligned with you. Even if you just say, "I saw on Twitter" or "I saw in Writer's Digest," it sounds stupid, but if an agent or editor knows that you subscribe to Writer's Digest or you follow Manuscript Wishlist on Twitter, they know you're serious. They know you're not a dabbler. They want to represent a professional writer, and every clue that you can give them that you are a pro counts and reading and following the business and tracking what agents are having sales and success is a form of saying, "I am serious."
[00:25:57] Matty: And the call to action, what call should you be making in your query letter as the call to action.
[00:26:03] Kelly: I think you should always say that you'll follow up because why wouldn't you? I mean, you might get ghosted. People get ghosted all the time. It doesn't always matter, but it also signals that you're going to not take no for an answer, I guess. I think that that's just a classic piece of advice. You shouldn't just leave it in their hands.
[00:26:23] The truth of it is it is in their hands, or in their assistant's hands, and people are, I shouldn't say the word "misbehaving," but I'm going to, you know, there's a whole lot of ghosting going on in society. No matter what you're trying to get from someone, whether you're applying for a job or you're trying to get an answer, there's a lot of people going dark. And you can't control that, but you can at least be persistent, and we can't just let it go without a fight.
[00:26:51] Matty: What would your recommendation be in terms of how quickly after you send your query letter you should follow up and how you should follow up.
[00:27:00] Kelly: I think you should follow up by email unless they request another form, and I think that you should give it a few months for sure, or check their guidelines because sometimes people say, don't follow up.
[00:27:11] There's all these examples where people find out that the agent had left the company, things like that. You don't want to be in the dark about that. And sometimes it's hard to get through. I have friends that are reporting that agents and editors are getting back to them more quickly now because they have more free time, but I think that people are not reading as quickly because they're busy at home, they're homeschooling their kids, they're juggling a lot. They're scared, they're worried, whatever. So some aspects of the business are happening more quickly and some are happening more slowly. So I would say always give people a little grace time, but not too much.
[00:27:47] Matty: And would you recommend that people follow up by forwarding their original query letter and saying, "Just wanted to follow up," or do you think they need to write basically a second query letter referencing that they had already submitted their work once?
[00:28:01] Kelly: I think that either approach can work. I've heard from people that have claimed that the forwarding worked. We don't know if the agent even saw the forwarded letter, but I think there's a certain amount of guilt in forwarding. I used to say that people should do that all the time because of the guilt. Guilt is an amazing motivator. It really is. Guilt is a huge tenant of the advertising profession.
[00:28:27] Matty: It's good to know. I'm glad I didn't have to ask whether the guilt aspect was a good thing or a bad thing.
[00:28:32] Kelly: Yeah. A follow-up letter that refers to the other letter and the date is kind of a form of forwarding, while breaking through whatever might've gotten your original email lost.
[00:28:44] Matty: And I'm assuming that if the agent or the publisher or the editor gets back to you and says, "No, thank you," that the only appropriate response is, "Thank you for your consideration," if you respond at all, correct?
[00:28:53] Kelly: One hundred percent. Any agent will tell you horror stories about people that wrote back like point / counterpoint, about why they are making a huge mistake. I wouldn't even respond right away. If you are angry, give it a day and then let it settle and then say thank you. Because it's a terrible business and you are disappointed all the time in a million different ways, and you can't let it get to you.
[00:29:21] Matty: I think another benefit of waiting is that I had the experience of sending my manuscript to an agent and I got back a very nice and clearly personalized decline. And I immediately just sent back saying, "Thank you for your consideration." She had said "This is a great story, but it's not the kind of story that I'm looking for right now."
[00:29:40] And then I was talking with a fellow author later and she said, "Oh, you should ask her if there's anyone else she would recommend. When you respond and say thank you, is there are anyone that she thinks would be better for it." At that point, I'd already sent my thank you and I didn't want to start pestering her, so I didn't, but if I'd just waited a day, even to send the happy thank you, I would have maybe thought of that on my own or had time to incorporate that without sending her two follow-ups.
[00:30:05] Kelly: Yes. I got one of my agents that way, by asking that question, and I think that it works particularly well if the agent has complimented you or said, "This is a great story, it's just not quite right for me because of XYZ reason." And a lot of times an agent will recommend you to someone else if they feel that strongly about it, but sometimes they're in a hurry and they don't.
[00:30:27] So if they compliment you, it's always worth asking. Always worth asking. And if they don't compliment you, it's still worth asking, but the answer is probably going to be no. Right. Because they have to like your work well enough to put a little bit of their reputation on the line.
[00:30:46] Matty: Yup. So the last section is the P.S. and you write, "Trust me, you need one." And I think this would be the hardest part. In the after one that you provided the P.S. was, "Did I mention my best friend is a publicist and will help me for free? No. Okay. Well she is." Do you have any tips for people to come up with a relevant P.S. for their submission?
[00:31:08] Kelly: I think that that example is a good example of something that you could never open a letter with. If there's something interesting or worthy about you or about what you bring to the table that isn't enough to go in the opening, then that's probably the P.S. And in this case, she had a little tiny ace in the hole. But, for me, one of my aces in the hole was having an advertising background and having a marketing background. So, I had access to people that could help me promote my book.
[00:31:45] Something like that is useful there. Some aspect of your research could go there, some aspect of your skill could go there. If there is something about your writing skillset, like that you taught third grade and that you dreamed of being a librarian or something quirky like that that could apply somehow. If you're part of a writer's community, something like that could go there. It really just has to be something interesting that's relevant that's cleverly stated, I would say.
[00:32:22] Matty: One thing that struck me about this letter is that it's somewhat irreverent. And so even with the P.S., if someone has written quite a serious, moody kind of novel, then how do they adjust it so that when the person reads the work, there's not a jarring difference between the tone of the letter and the tone of the work?
[00:32:43] Kelly: Right. In this case, this was a letter written by a woman who'd written a colorful, quirky murder mystery. So, I think that it was relevant to her genre to have a slightly more lighthearted, colorful tone. But if you've written a literary novel or a very serious historical work, I think that you want to be vibrant and clear, but you don't necessarily want to be jokey.
[00:33:09] You can be vibrant and clear and interesting and even clever without being super lighthearted. I did work with someone not that long ago who had three offers of representation within like 48 hours of me fixing her letter, and I did inject some lightheartedness into it, even though it was a serious memoir about her struggles growing up. And, I think that that's part of what made it stand out, was by putting a tiny bit of light-heartedness in the P.S. with a smile to it.
[00:33:48] So, it wasn't a joke necessarily. It alluded to her relationship with the agent down the road. But I think that it was just a little tiny drop. The rest of the letter was very serious but very well crafted. People can be very serious and still have a sense of humor, so I think a little drop of warmth or a little drop of humanity with a smile is totally fine. But you wouldn't have a subject line like, "should I kill my family," obviously that cannot be your subject line.
[00:34:16] Matty: I liked the reference you made that the book proves whether you can write and the query letter proves whether you can talk about your book. I'm wondering if a way people might approach this, and my examples are going to be old fashioned because I don't have any current examples, but if you think of yourself going on Fresh Air with Terry Gross or something like that, what would you talk about? You could even record what you think your side of that interview would sound like, and then sort of work through that. You might say in your chat with Terry that, "Oh man, my family drives me insane. I sometimes think about killing them," and say, "Oh, perfect." You're not going to want to include all half hour of your conversation with the fictional Terry Gross, but it might be an easier way to get those little bits that you wouldn't get if you were just sitting down at your keyboard saying, "Oh man, what should I tell somebody about my book?"
[00:35:10] Kelly: Well, honestly, it's all about knowing yourself. And if you are a person that is more comfortable talking out loud and more comfortable having a one-on-one chat across coffee with somebody than you are writing a letter, certain people are very verbal and walk around the room talking to themselves.
[00:35:29] Someone like that I think would really benefit from that approach because they could hear themselves being conversational rather than thinking, "I'm sitting and staring at the page, so I have to be professorial." And honestly that is the problem with a letter versus writing a book. People bring their academic self and they bring their research self and they bring their serious author self to the page, when a letter is a conversation.
[00:35:57] People are pretty well tuned to the idea that they have to have a short elevator pitch for their book-- a cocktail party description of their book. So once you have that, that can form the basis for a longer synopsis or a query letter.
[00:36:13] So, I usually tell people to start with that. What you're describing would be a good way for certain people to get to that. Or to ask someone who isn't you to describe the book based on your terrible synopsis, you know? I think that certain people who are good at speaking would do better than the author herself.
[00:36:34] Matty: I think everybody's homework assignment should be to set up a virtual cocktail party or, once the quarantine lifts, an actual cocktail party, and invite your friends so that you can walk up to them and say, "Oh man, I get so fed up with my family. Sometimes I want to kill them, but you know what I did instead?" And make sure you have your recorder on when you say that so you can capture those gems for your query letter.
[00:36:54] Kelly: You know, it's hard. It's hard. Writing is a very serious endeavor but writing a letter to someone is a completely different part of your brain. You're trying to get them to respond. You're not trying to impress them with the breadth of your 300-page ability.
[00:37:12] Matty: Well, Kelly, thank you so much for talking us through that. I think that any listener who follows Kelly's advice and makes some progress with it, owes it to Kelly to drop her a note and let her know that.
[00:37:23] But let the listeners know where they can find out more about you and your work online.
[00:37:28] Kelly: My website is kellysimmonsbooks.com. I'm on Instagram at Kelly A. Simmons. I'm on Twitter at Kelly Simmons . And wherever books are sold, baby.
[00:37:39] Matty: Thank you very much, Kelly. This was great.
[00:37:41] Kelly: It was fun.
[00:05:42] Kelly: And you see it all the time. There are people who write brilliant, brilliant books, and their social media is horrible, because they can't go from the long form to the short form.
[00:05:53] And it's pretty easy to learn. You don't have to know everything about it. You don't have to go back to school and become an advertising veteran. Once you get it condensed down, then you can reuse it. I mean, an elevator pitch or a theme line for your book, all those smaller things are useful and they can actually guide you in the writing of a book.
[00:06:13] I know a few writers keep their elevator pitch pinned to their computer on a sticky note. It helps guide you as to what the final effect that you want the reader to have.
[00:06:27] Matty: Brian and I talked about the idea of writing your book description before you write the book, because that's the point at which you have that overarching sense of the tone and the major characters and the theme, but you're not so bogged down. And I imagine the same could be true of query letters.
[00:06:45] Kelly: Yes. I think Brian and I should go on the road. We should pitch a tent.
[00:06:49] Matty: I think you should. I'll do an introduction.
[00:06:54] So the approach we're going to use for this is that Kelly graciously provided a before and after query letter so that I didn't have to use my own query letter.
[00:07:03] Kelly: You're afraid.
[00:07:05] Matty: Yeah. Well, I wrote a query letter last year. Speaking of being a hybrid author, I'm sending a book around with a query letter, but it's already been edited so many times, I was scared to use it for this one because I just can't go back to it anymore. I've gotten too much input.
[00:07:20] But you were nice enough to provide one where the names have been changed to protect the innocent, if this was based on an actual letter. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to read through this before version and then we're going to talk about how that might not be the most effective way of approaching someone. So here's the before version.
Dear Agent,
My book is about a woman who, feeling guilty in her role in a murder--a murder that her daughter witnessed--runs to her mother's house and tries to explain. Feeling the only option is to hide, she decides to leave her parents behind and run away. First arriving in Iowa to stay with a quirky farmer, then moving on to Minnesota where she thinks about setting up housekeeping with a local librarian and begins to date over her daughter's objections, and ultimately settling in California where she finds a job in a bakery while still attempting to evade the law.
The title is Where Jane Goes, and it's complete at 90,000 words.
I spent the last year writing it while juggling my responsibilities as a stay at home mom. I would love for you to represent it.
Sincerely,
Author
[00:08:24] So what do you think?
[00:08:26] Kelly: Well, I purposely picked something that had a number of flaws, and most query letters that people read to me at the coffee house or send to me through Drexel or wherever do not have this many sins in it. But a lot of them are common. This particular example has four sins in it. The first problem is the book description, right? Leading with the book description, which I do recommend people do if they feel that they don't have a strong thing to lead with.
[00:08:59] This book description breaks every good example by being one that just says, and then, and then, and then, and then. It's like a seven-year-old telling you a story. They just go on and on, or someone describing their dream to you.
[00:09:14] So rather than being more global about what happens in the book and rising above and talking about the lead character's journey, people go into subplots, people make them too long. In this case, it just sounds like a drive through different states.
[00:09:33] Matty: A travelog.
[00:09:34] Kelly: Exactly.
[00:09:35] So that's mistake number one.
[00:09:36] Mistake number two, which is actually a very common mistake, we talk about the section I call "why me?" Why should you represent me? What's the most unique thing about you in the agent or the publisher's mind? And I hear this all the time. "There's nothing unique about me." "I'm retired." "I'm a stay at home mom." "I have no experience." And then when you tease it out, you find that people do have some experience usually, or I tell them to make light of the fact that they have no experience or to use the fact that they have no experience. So, she makes a classic mistake in assuming that they are going to be interested in the fact that she's a stay at home mom.
[00:10:16] And she gives no reason for the "why you" section--why that particular agent is a good choice for her. The opening is flat. The opening is most important part of any letter because people don't always make it past the opening.
[00:10:33] Matty: Let me just mention the three rules. I'm going to provide a link to this article that I'm reading from that Kelly wrote about queries, and I'll just bang through, first of all, the three rules of queries, and you can make any additional comments you want to make about the ones they may have violated in that example.
[00:10:52] Kelly: Yes. The overarching rules.
[00:10:53] Matty: Yup. So the first rule is keep it short. Do you think that that example violated the keep it short just based on length?
[00:11:00] Kelly: No. That's the one thing it doesn't do. It is short enough.
[00:11:04] Matty: Okay. And the second rule is don't sound like an asshole. I don't know that this person really sounded like an asshole, but it sounded boring.
[00:11:15] Kelly: It's boring. It's boring and she doesn't give herself enough credit. Most queries that I see are the reverse. The sound like an asshole rule is for people that say, "My book is a mashup between Salman Rushdie and, Ken Kesey." You know, you would be shocked, shocked how many really nice, really talented, humble people that I meet in person send me queries that make them sound like they are the next John Irving. And I'm like, "Dude, you can't do that. You can't do that."
[00:11:50] Matty: I think it's interesting because I suspect people are doing that because they have internalized the fact that this is an advertising effort, and they think, "Oh, well, I know advertising. Advertising is always about the advertiser saying how fabulous their product is." So what's the difference in the mindset you have to bring so that you're selling your product, but you're not sounding like an asshole.
[00:12:13] Kelly: Right. That's a very good point. You don't want to overdo anything, right? You want to provide just enough color and just enough thinking and well-written -ness in your letter so that people think that you are a pro and that you know the business, versus just throwing things at the wall and being grandiose. No one is a combination of Ken Kesey and Salman Rushdie. Those are not current examples. I always tell people to make it about the work and not about the person, right? Not who you are, but your work has echoes of.
[00:12:55] And to not pick people who are perennial bestsellers because you have more in common with someone just starting out. So I ask them to look for a current examples of books that were published recently and to think of that second tier of author, not the first tier.
[00:13:15] Matty: What would you consider "recently"?
[00:13:17] Kelly: The last five years. And I'm telling you, no one does that unless people are really smart and have gone to a bunch of writers conferences and have really gotten a lot of advice from people. People who may be perfectly good writers, but who aren't as savvy about the business, they always pick big classic names, from people who can do no wrong. It doesn't matter if you write like John Grisham, you know what I mean? John Grisham can do no wrong. People compare themselves to the Outlander series. Well, again, she can do no wrong. And it may be that the agent or the publisher does see that in you, but if it's not leavened with a little bit of humility. they'll take a look at the first page and say, "Okay, no, that's not her."
[00:14:03] Matty: The third rule is don't become an automatic no. At what point in that before letter did that become an automatic no?
[00:14:13] Kelly: That is such a good question, Matty. And I think it's right away because the book description is terrible, so she unwittingly leads with one of the weakest parts. There's actually no strengths in the letter, but you're going to lead with your book description. It has to be a very vivid and well-written book description. And a lot of people do lead with their book description because they don't feel that they have a personal connection to lead with.
[00:14:42] Because those are the other things I recommend. Do you have a connection to that person? Have you met that person before? Do you have a friend in common? Those should always be in the lead. If you are a professional or you have some sort of interesting connection to your material, like you're an expert in something about your book or your career is tied to something in your book, I always feel that that should possibly be the opening, because it differentiates you. If you're an Ivy league graduate or if you have an MFA from a prestigious place, honestly, that has to be woven in very, very early because it does provide a bit of color that registers with people.
[00:15:23] So, a lot of times people put that lower, and it's like, if I don't get there, if I don't see that you went to Harvard and got straight A's, it doesn't matter.
[00:15:34]
[00:15:34] Matty: I'm guessing that this became a no at about word five, after "My book is about ..."
[00:15:41] Kelly: "My book is about." Yup.
[00:15:42] She also did not name her genre. She told us how long the book was. Some agents say they want to know that because they want to know that you are a professional. They want to know that you haven't written a 160,000-word novel. But honestly, you can know so much about a person without knowing the word count, by how well-written their book description is.
[00:16:07] Matty: So would your advice about facts like somebody having gone to Harvard or being a straight A student, would that vary depending on the content of the book they're pitching?
[00:16:18] Kelly: Yes. And straight A's in the young might be helpful, but I guess the most important thing is that if you have a connection to the book that is unusual.
[00:16:34] Matty: I know you having just written a book about the college life, then that would be very applicable in that circumstance. So we've been tormenting people with the bad version. And, fortunately I have the after version and Kelly, I don't know if you have this and would like to read it or you would like me to read it.
[00:16:51] Kelly: It's totally up to you. I have it here.
[00:16:53] Matty: Yeah. If you have it there, please go ahead.
[00:16:55] Kelly: And then we can talk about why it's better.
Dear Agent,
When my family drives me insane, I sometimes consider killing them. Then I realized it's probably better to work these things out in fiction. So for the past 10 years, when everyone's asleep, I've honed by ability to write women's commercial fiction, and I've just completed my first novel, There Jane Goes, which I'd love for you to represent.
Jane Morgan's biggest problem wasn't that she'd just committed a murder. It was that her daughter witnessed her doing it. My novel follows Jane on a year-long cross-country fugitive flight as she turns their lives into a bigger adventure and helps her daughter forget the unforgettable.
It's contemporary women's fiction with thriller elements: Anne Tyler crossed with Anne Rice. I hope you'll agree to read the work of a crazy housewife. I've heard you've had some wonderful sales in my genr--yes, we've been talking about you on Twitter--and I look forward to sending you more pages. I'll follow up in two weeks.
Sincerely yours,
Crazy in Cleveland, AKA Joan Robbins.
P.S. Did I mention my best friend is a publicist and will help me for free? No? Okay. Well, she is.
[00:18:05] Matty: That's a pretty clear difference between the before and after examples.
[00:18:09] Kelly: Yeah. I wanted to give you something that would definitely pop, but it illustrates what you can do with basically nothing.
[00:18:17] I mean, she doesn't have any special skills as a novelist, except the ability to write about being a novelist, you know? She's written about her book in a much more contained, interesting, vivid way, by describing it as a cross-country, fugitive flight, rather than saying she goes on the road and then goes to her mother's house and then goes to ... so parts of it are condensed.
[00:18:44] And it's a good description, even though she uses classic authors--by blending them, it sounds new. Anne Tyler crossed with Anne Rice sounds fresh and different. She names her genre. But she opens with something completely unusual, that she's basically a housewife with an imagination, and she proves it by writing a good letter.
[00:19:06] The other thing she does, and I tell people to do this all the time, is to put a P.S. at the end of their letter, because P.S.s are the second most commonly read piece of a letter, even though they're at the bottom, because your eye just goes to something that's after the end.
[00:19:22] So she pulls out another piece of information and puts it there in a nice way. To me, this is an example of a classic but unusual letter because the writer doesn't have a lot of the elements most people do. Most people have some experience writing. Most people have something to say about their academic career. Most people have something interesting about their book. Maybe that's their research. Research shows that you're serious. Research gives you story angles. And an editor or an agent is thinking about those things. And those are things that people don't realize are important.
[00:19:59] They think it's all about the book because the agent always says, "Oh, it's all about the book." So they write this long, wide description of their book, that proves that they can't talk about their book.
[00:20:14] Matty: What would the subject line be of this after version?
[00:20:17] Kelly: I'm trying to think what it was. It was good. It had an emoji in it, which I also tell people to consider, which horrifies people. It just depends. The person reading this is going to be a very young person. It's someone's assistant who is used to looking at emojis.
[00:20:37] Kelly: It was something like "Writing versus Killing, Which Should I Do?" And then it had a pen emoji or something. It had a question mark, which sometimes is a useful ploy. But the subject line of the email is very important as well.
[00:20:51] And the subject line can be an automatic no. An automatic no can be spelling the agent's name wrong. Sending something that's outside of the genres that they have clearly indicated they want is an automatic no. It's like addressing the children's book librarian when you write adult. Whoever your letter's going to, it has to address that person's needs, not your own. So that's an easy mistake to make, no matter what kind of letter you are writing.
[00:21:18] Matty: Will your query letter be in someone's email box along with a lot of other email, so that if you were to write, "Should I write or should I kill," something along those lines, is there a danger that it's going to not be apparent that it's a query letter and get sent to their spam folder, or are the emails that you're sending query letters to pretty much dedicated to query letters?
[00:21:42] Kelly: Sometimes, agents have several emails and sometimes they'll tell you what they want the query line to be in their submission guidelines. And I always say, you have to follow the agent's submission guidelines first because if they say they want this to be the subject line and they want this to be the opening and they want so many pages attached, you have to listen to them. Because they'll be mad if you don't listen to them. So you have to put my advice aside.
[00:22:08] But what's more likely to go to spam is something that says "free" or "exciting" or something that sounds sexual. I mean, there are certain words that you use that sound like you're trying to sell someone, like I give the example of "Viagra for the mind." No, no, no, no. It goes straight to spam.
[00:22:30] Matty: Yeah. As well it should.
[00:22:32] Kelly: Lots of exclamation marks are a problem also. Anything like that. So I do have in my book guidance about going into spam too. But, yeah, sometimes they want the word query in it. Sometimes they don't.
[00:22:44] But if you have a hundred queries in your inbox, which agents tell me all the time that they do, something that has an emoji in it or something that has a slightly different word in it is going to stand out for sure.
[00:22:58] Matty: Just so that people who aren't able to look at the article themselves know what the sections are, there are seven sections of the query letter: the email subject line, the all-important opening, the book description, the why me, the why you, the call to action, and the P.S. We've talked a little bit about the email subject line. Any other comments about the all-important opening?
[00:23:25] Kelly: Yeah, that is where people really have to bring it. Even if you ignore everything else that I say, you have to nail your opening. And that is always either a great book description or something interesting about the writer or about the writer's connection to the material, just 100%. Or a connection between the agent and the writer. That has to go first. Doesn't matter how good your book is, if there's some interesting thing that connects you to that person, that has to go in the opening for them to go further. And most people's openings are weak.
[00:24:03] Matty: In this case, the after example combines the opening and the why me aspect.
[00:24:09] Kelly: Yes.
[00:24:10] Matty: Because you're combining that "My family drives me insane. I sometimes consider killing them," is a pretty gripping opening, and then the explanation about "it's probably better to work these things out in fiction," and for the past 10 years she's been writing is the why me portion of that.
[00:24:24] Kelly: Correct. Most people's letters follow a very staid format: "Dear so and so, I am writing to you because I admire you." And they flatter the agent right off the bat. Or they go right into themselves right off the bat: "I'm writing to you because I just wrote a blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." Or "I'm writing to you because you are great." And both of those things are very ordinary. Their eyes have to go straight to the next paragraph. It's always a mistake to be boring when you're trying to stand out in an inbox of a hundred or 200 other entries.
[00:24:57] Matty: How do you balance the "not flattering" with the "why you" section?
[00:25:02] Kelly: It's fine to flatter them, but it has to make sense for your book. So you'd have to say something like, "I admire the job that you've done for so-and-so." And that so-and-so should be someone in your genre or someone aligned with you. Even if you just say, "I saw on Twitter" or "I saw in Writer's Digest," it sounds stupid, but if an agent or editor knows that you subscribe to Writer's Digest or you follow Manuscript Wishlist on Twitter, they know you're serious. They know you're not a dabbler. They want to represent a professional writer, and every clue that you can give them that you are a pro counts and reading and following the business and tracking what agents are having sales and success is a form of saying, "I am serious."
[00:25:57] Matty: And the call to action, what call should you be making in your query letter as the call to action.
[00:26:03] Kelly: I think you should always say that you'll follow up because why wouldn't you? I mean, you might get ghosted. People get ghosted all the time. It doesn't always matter, but it also signals that you're going to not take no for an answer, I guess. I think that that's just a classic piece of advice. You shouldn't just leave it in their hands.
[00:26:23] The truth of it is it is in their hands, or in their assistant's hands, and people are, I shouldn't say the word "misbehaving," but I'm going to, you know, there's a whole lot of ghosting going on in society. No matter what you're trying to get from someone, whether you're applying for a job or you're trying to get an answer, there's a lot of people going dark. And you can't control that, but you can at least be persistent, and we can't just let it go without a fight.
[00:26:51] Matty: What would your recommendation be in terms of how quickly after you send your query letter you should follow up and how you should follow up.
[00:27:00] Kelly: I think you should follow up by email unless they request another form, and I think that you should give it a few months for sure, or check their guidelines because sometimes people say, don't follow up.
[00:27:11] There's all these examples where people find out that the agent had left the company, things like that. You don't want to be in the dark about that. And sometimes it's hard to get through. I have friends that are reporting that agents and editors are getting back to them more quickly now because they have more free time, but I think that people are not reading as quickly because they're busy at home, they're homeschooling their kids, they're juggling a lot. They're scared, they're worried, whatever. So some aspects of the business are happening more quickly and some are happening more slowly. So I would say always give people a little grace time, but not too much.
[00:27:47] Matty: And would you recommend that people follow up by forwarding their original query letter and saying, "Just wanted to follow up," or do you think they need to write basically a second query letter referencing that they had already submitted their work once?
[00:28:01] Kelly: I think that either approach can work. I've heard from people that have claimed that the forwarding worked. We don't know if the agent even saw the forwarded letter, but I think there's a certain amount of guilt in forwarding. I used to say that people should do that all the time because of the guilt. Guilt is an amazing motivator. It really is. Guilt is a huge tenant of the advertising profession.
[00:28:27] Matty: It's good to know. I'm glad I didn't have to ask whether the guilt aspect was a good thing or a bad thing.
[00:28:32] Kelly: Yeah. A follow-up letter that refers to the other letter and the date is kind of a form of forwarding, while breaking through whatever might've gotten your original email lost.
[00:28:44] Matty: And I'm assuming that if the agent or the publisher or the editor gets back to you and says, "No, thank you," that the only appropriate response is, "Thank you for your consideration," if you respond at all, correct?
[00:28:53] Kelly: One hundred percent. Any agent will tell you horror stories about people that wrote back like point / counterpoint, about why they are making a huge mistake. I wouldn't even respond right away. If you are angry, give it a day and then let it settle and then say thank you. Because it's a terrible business and you are disappointed all the time in a million different ways, and you can't let it get to you.
[00:29:21] Matty: I think another benefit of waiting is that I had the experience of sending my manuscript to an agent and I got back a very nice and clearly personalized decline. And I immediately just sent back saying, "Thank you for your consideration." She had said "This is a great story, but it's not the kind of story that I'm looking for right now."
[00:29:40] And then I was talking with a fellow author later and she said, "Oh, you should ask her if there's anyone else she would recommend. When you respond and say thank you, is there are anyone that she thinks would be better for it." At that point, I'd already sent my thank you and I didn't want to start pestering her, so I didn't, but if I'd just waited a day, even to send the happy thank you, I would have maybe thought of that on my own or had time to incorporate that without sending her two follow-ups.
[00:30:05] Kelly: Yes. I got one of my agents that way, by asking that question, and I think that it works particularly well if the agent has complimented you or said, "This is a great story, it's just not quite right for me because of XYZ reason." And a lot of times an agent will recommend you to someone else if they feel that strongly about it, but sometimes they're in a hurry and they don't.
[00:30:27] So if they compliment you, it's always worth asking. Always worth asking. And if they don't compliment you, it's still worth asking, but the answer is probably going to be no. Right. Because they have to like your work well enough to put a little bit of their reputation on the line.
[00:30:46] Matty: Yup. So the last section is the P.S. and you write, "Trust me, you need one." And I think this would be the hardest part. In the after one that you provided the P.S. was, "Did I mention my best friend is a publicist and will help me for free? No. Okay. Well she is." Do you have any tips for people to come up with a relevant P.S. for their submission?
[00:31:08] Kelly: I think that that example is a good example of something that you could never open a letter with. If there's something interesting or worthy about you or about what you bring to the table that isn't enough to go in the opening, then that's probably the P.S. And in this case, she had a little tiny ace in the hole. But, for me, one of my aces in the hole was having an advertising background and having a marketing background. So, I had access to people that could help me promote my book.
[00:31:45] Something like that is useful there. Some aspect of your research could go there, some aspect of your skill could go there. If there is something about your writing skillset, like that you taught third grade and that you dreamed of being a librarian or something quirky like that that could apply somehow. If you're part of a writer's community, something like that could go there. It really just has to be something interesting that's relevant that's cleverly stated, I would say.
[00:32:22] Matty: One thing that struck me about this letter is that it's somewhat irreverent. And so even with the P.S., if someone has written quite a serious, moody kind of novel, then how do they adjust it so that when the person reads the work, there's not a jarring difference between the tone of the letter and the tone of the work?
[00:32:43] Kelly: Right. In this case, this was a letter written by a woman who'd written a colorful, quirky murder mystery. So, I think that it was relevant to her genre to have a slightly more lighthearted, colorful tone. But if you've written a literary novel or a very serious historical work, I think that you want to be vibrant and clear, but you don't necessarily want to be jokey.
[00:33:09] You can be vibrant and clear and interesting and even clever without being super lighthearted. I did work with someone not that long ago who had three offers of representation within like 48 hours of me fixing her letter, and I did inject some lightheartedness into it, even though it was a serious memoir about her struggles growing up. And, I think that that's part of what made it stand out, was by putting a tiny bit of light-heartedness in the P.S. with a smile to it.
[00:33:48] So, it wasn't a joke necessarily. It alluded to her relationship with the agent down the road. But I think that it was just a little tiny drop. The rest of the letter was very serious but very well crafted. People can be very serious and still have a sense of humor, so I think a little drop of warmth or a little drop of humanity with a smile is totally fine. But you wouldn't have a subject line like, "should I kill my family," obviously that cannot be your subject line.
[00:34:16] Matty: I liked the reference you made that the book proves whether you can write and the query letter proves whether you can talk about your book. I'm wondering if a way people might approach this, and my examples are going to be old fashioned because I don't have any current examples, but if you think of yourself going on Fresh Air with Terry Gross or something like that, what would you talk about? You could even record what you think your side of that interview would sound like, and then sort of work through that. You might say in your chat with Terry that, "Oh man, my family drives me insane. I sometimes think about killing them," and say, "Oh, perfect." You're not going to want to include all half hour of your conversation with the fictional Terry Gross, but it might be an easier way to get those little bits that you wouldn't get if you were just sitting down at your keyboard saying, "Oh man, what should I tell somebody about my book?"
[00:35:10] Kelly: Well, honestly, it's all about knowing yourself. And if you are a person that is more comfortable talking out loud and more comfortable having a one-on-one chat across coffee with somebody than you are writing a letter, certain people are very verbal and walk around the room talking to themselves.
[00:35:29] Someone like that I think would really benefit from that approach because they could hear themselves being conversational rather than thinking, "I'm sitting and staring at the page, so I have to be professorial." And honestly that is the problem with a letter versus writing a book. People bring their academic self and they bring their research self and they bring their serious author self to the page, when a letter is a conversation.
[00:35:57] People are pretty well tuned to the idea that they have to have a short elevator pitch for their book-- a cocktail party description of their book. So once you have that, that can form the basis for a longer synopsis or a query letter.
[00:36:13] So, I usually tell people to start with that. What you're describing would be a good way for certain people to get to that. Or to ask someone who isn't you to describe the book based on your terrible synopsis, you know? I think that certain people who are good at speaking would do better than the author herself.
[00:36:34] Matty: I think everybody's homework assignment should be to set up a virtual cocktail party or, once the quarantine lifts, an actual cocktail party, and invite your friends so that you can walk up to them and say, "Oh man, I get so fed up with my family. Sometimes I want to kill them, but you know what I did instead?" And make sure you have your recorder on when you say that so you can capture those gems for your query letter.
[00:36:54] Kelly: You know, it's hard. It's hard. Writing is a very serious endeavor but writing a letter to someone is a completely different part of your brain. You're trying to get them to respond. You're not trying to impress them with the breadth of your 300-page ability.
[00:37:12] Matty: Well, Kelly, thank you so much for talking us through that. I think that any listener who follows Kelly's advice and makes some progress with it, owes it to Kelly to drop her a note and let her know that.
[00:37:23] But let the listeners know where they can find out more about you and your work online.
[00:37:28] Kelly: My website is kellysimmonsbooks.com. I'm on Instagram at Kelly A. Simmons. I'm on Twitter at Kelly Simmons . And wherever books are sold, baby.
[00:37:39] Matty: Thank you very much, Kelly. This was great.
[00:37:41] Kelly: It was fun.
Links
How to Write a Great Freaking Query Letter by Kelly Simmons
Matty takes the plunge ...
In the episode, I said that I was not using my own query letter as our example because I had already gotten a lot of great input on it--not only from other authors but from agents as well. However, after the episode aired, I decided I couldn't pass up the opportunity to get Kelly's take on the letter, and she proved that even after all the careful crafting I had done and great advice I had received and incorporated, there was still room for improvement (before-and-after below and attached). Thank you, Kelly!
kelly_simmons_fix_to_matty_query_always_faithful.pdf |
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