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JEand i mean almost every single one.
not the writing. not the concept. not even the comps, which writers agonize over more than anything else and matter significantly less than they’ve been led to believe.
it’s that the query describes what happens in the book instead of telling me what the book is. and those are not the same thing, and nobody explains the difference until a writer has already collected enough rejections to wallpaper a room.
i see it from debut writers and i see it from writers who’ve been querying for years. i see it from writers with MFAs and writers who’ve never taken a class. it cuts across every genre and every experience level because it’s not a skill gap — it’s a framing problem. and framing problems are invisible when you’re too close to your own work, which every writer is, because they had to be to write the book in the first place.
the closeness that makes you a good writer is the exact thing that makes the query hard. you’ve been inside this book for years. you know every layer of it. and then someone asks you to describe it in 250 words to a stranger who has 87 other emails to read today, and you do what any reasonable person would do — you describe what you know. which is everything that happens.
but i don’t need everything that happens. i need to know what kind of reader this book is going to feel like oxygen to. and those are wildly different documents.
the fixable part is real though. that’s the thing. this one is actually fixable.
follow @jessica__berg because i’m the literary agent who is telling you how to make your query better and will tell you what’s actually in the way.
@jessica__berg
