How Are Query Letters Like Direct Marketing?
To paraphrase the old theatrical saying, Writing a book is easy; writing a query letter is hard. Having finally decided that the manuscript for my new novel is ready to submit to literary agents, I spent last week writing, rewriting, editing, and obsessing over the query letter.
The query letter is akin to the catalog cover or the Website landing page: It is what agents scan to determine if they want to read the manuscript itself. So with that in mind, I decided to apply lessons learned from years of covering the marketing industry to the query-drafting process. For instance:
