Agent Query Letter #127
Dear ------,
I’m writing to pitch you my debut novel, Crossings, even though it's unlikely it will make it past your assistant. Even if it does, this email will probably linger in your inbox a day or two before you stick it in a folder, possibly entitled ‘Queries’, where it will languish for some months longer. It will only be on the eve of the summer holidays that it will be deleted, unread, as part of a desperate attempt to organize yourself before heading off to the beach with too much to read as it is.
If, by chance, you do open it, it is unlikely you reach even this point of the query letter, as you find this kind of willful self-deprecation only mildly and ephemerally amusing, and somewhat undergraduate in tone.
If you get over that hump, there is then the manuscript itself: 115,000 words from an unknown French-Armenian-Australian ex-travel writer living in Los Angeles.
If, by some miracle, you open the attached file, you will be unimpressed by the title, Crossings, but perhaps you will soldier on all the same to read the synopsis and the author biography at the front of the manuscript—although I would recommend you skip these and go straight to the preface.
“Who writes prefaces for novels?" you will rightfully ask yourself, but as you read it, things will start looking up. You will be heartened by the intrigue in the opening paragraphs. But as you go on you will realize that, although the writing is solid, the premise is too strange, too oddball, too unconventional for you to represent.
As if all this is not enough, there’ll be another sticking point: you will find a novel written in such a way that it can be read in two very different sequences—conventionally, or by hopping around according to an alternative reading scheme indicated by page numbers at the end of each chapter. You will silently protest that the publishers you normally deal with are inherently conservative and would not be interested in such strangeness, but the booklover in you will begrudgingly admire the audacity of the concept.
If you continue reading, not for any professional purpose, needless to say, but simply out of the same curiosity that makes pedestrians stop at the scene of a car crash, you will read three stories. The first, the hardboiled yarn of a Jewish émigré writer falling in love in Paris just as the Nazis are about to invade, will strike you as having some good atmospheric elements. The second, a story about Charles Baudelaire’s last days in Brussels, will strike you as verbose but intermittently comic. The last story, about the seven lives of a deathless succubus, will strike you as the bastard child of Anne Rice and Paulo Coelho. Altogether, the stories will tell the story of two, and later three, characters who, over 150 years, cheat death by crossing from one body to another by looking someone else in the eyes for several minutes.
As you hack your way through the jungle of verbiage, you will realize, about one third of the way in, that what you are reading might well be one of the most original submissions you have ever received. It will dawn on you that this unclassifiable literary mongrel might well be weirdly in sync with the obsessions of our time: history, identity, hybridity, migration, metamorphosis, intertextuality. You will perhaps even fleetingly wonder if publishing isn’t crying out for exactly this kind of book.
You will speculate how this oddity might be received, were it ever to be published and adroitly marketed. Would it be hailed as an instant classic? Would it be forgotten, like so many other high-minded tomes? Would it languish on shelves for years before becoming a cult favorite? Would it be optioned by Damon Lindelof or some other Hollywood hotshot? Would it translate to television, or gaming, or virtual reality? Could the sequels—at least two of them, the author promises, and perhaps more—build on it and turn it into an unlikely publishing phenomenon, like Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander series?
You will be increasingly convinced that you have stumbled on the great literary masterwork of the age. You will sigh for a day, long ago, when agents and publishers could take a risk on a book like this, so new and yet so recognizably part of a tradition that stretches back to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, not to mention Borges, Verne and Swift. You will be overcome with that familiar wave of dread about the future of literature that periodically consumes you, and very soon it will morph into a dread about the future of the very world itself, and all that is in it. This will prompt you to ask yourself, once more, if it isn't too late to do something else with your life.
Finally, having read long into the night to reach the conclusion (heartbreaking but open-ended, in readiness for the sequel), you will reach for your laptop and you will type an email with your response:
Thank you for submitting your work. Unfortunately, on this occasion ...
Sincerely,
Alex Landragin
I’m writing to pitch you my debut novel, Crossings, even though it's unlikely it will make it past your assistant. Even if it does, this email will probably linger in your inbox a day or two before you stick it in a folder, possibly entitled ‘Queries’, where it will languish for some months longer. It will only be on the eve of the summer holidays that it will be deleted, unread, as part of a desperate attempt to organize yourself before heading off to the beach with too much to read as it is.
If, by chance, you do open it, it is unlikely you reach even this point of the query letter, as you find this kind of willful self-deprecation only mildly and ephemerally amusing, and somewhat undergraduate in tone.
If you get over that hump, there is then the manuscript itself: 115,000 words from an unknown French-Armenian-Australian ex-travel writer living in Los Angeles.
If, by some miracle, you open the attached file, you will be unimpressed by the title, Crossings, but perhaps you will soldier on all the same to read the synopsis and the author biography at the front of the manuscript—although I would recommend you skip these and go straight to the preface.
“Who writes prefaces for novels?" you will rightfully ask yourself, but as you read it, things will start looking up. You will be heartened by the intrigue in the opening paragraphs. But as you go on you will realize that, although the writing is solid, the premise is too strange, too oddball, too unconventional for you to represent.
As if all this is not enough, there’ll be another sticking point: you will find a novel written in such a way that it can be read in two very different sequences—conventionally, or by hopping around according to an alternative reading scheme indicated by page numbers at the end of each chapter. You will silently protest that the publishers you normally deal with are inherently conservative and would not be interested in such strangeness, but the booklover in you will begrudgingly admire the audacity of the concept.
If you continue reading, not for any professional purpose, needless to say, but simply out of the same curiosity that makes pedestrians stop at the scene of a car crash, you will read three stories. The first, the hardboiled yarn of a Jewish émigré writer falling in love in Paris just as the Nazis are about to invade, will strike you as having some good atmospheric elements. The second, a story about Charles Baudelaire’s last days in Brussels, will strike you as verbose but intermittently comic. The last story, about the seven lives of a deathless succubus, will strike you as the bastard child of Anne Rice and Paulo Coelho. Altogether, the stories will tell the story of two, and later three, characters who, over 150 years, cheat death by crossing from one body to another by looking someone else in the eyes for several minutes.
As you hack your way through the jungle of verbiage, you will realize, about one third of the way in, that what you are reading might well be one of the most original submissions you have ever received. It will dawn on you that this unclassifiable literary mongrel might well be weirdly in sync with the obsessions of our time: history, identity, hybridity, migration, metamorphosis, intertextuality. You will perhaps even fleetingly wonder if publishing isn’t crying out for exactly this kind of book.
You will speculate how this oddity might be received, were it ever to be published and adroitly marketed. Would it be hailed as an instant classic? Would it be forgotten, like so many other high-minded tomes? Would it languish on shelves for years before becoming a cult favorite? Would it be optioned by Damon Lindelof or some other Hollywood hotshot? Would it translate to television, or gaming, or virtual reality? Could the sequels—at least two of them, the author promises, and perhaps more—build on it and turn it into an unlikely publishing phenomenon, like Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander series?
You will be increasingly convinced that you have stumbled on the great literary masterwork of the age. You will sigh for a day, long ago, when agents and publishers could take a risk on a book like this, so new and yet so recognizably part of a tradition that stretches back to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, not to mention Borges, Verne and Swift. You will be overcome with that familiar wave of dread about the future of literature that periodically consumes you, and very soon it will morph into a dread about the future of the very world itself, and all that is in it. This will prompt you to ask yourself, once more, if it isn't too late to do something else with your life.
Finally, having read long into the night to reach the conclusion (heartbreaking but open-ended, in readiness for the sequel), you will reach for your laptop and you will type an email with your response:
Thank you for submitting your work. Unfortunately, on this occasion ...
Sincerely,
Alex Landragin