I want to make sure I write about this subject delicately – if by some chance, this blog ever goes viral for whatever reason – as I don’t want to put query writers out of a job.

However, I came across an author who sent me their query letter and after reading and asking to have a talk with them, revealed to me they had a professional query writer write the prose for their letter and actually paid for it. The author also told me he had seen sparse responses from other literary agents or that most were not interested in the book.

I, myself, took some issue with the letter, despite it having all the main elements a query should have (a logline, descriptive synopsis, an about-the-author, opening chapters, etc.), but the way the book had been described almost lost my interest entirely.

The letter opens with a logline describing the rooting interest for the book’s main character, saying the protagonist was a strong female lead who is hardworking and diligent, and for whatever reason described her as an “iconic 1950s protagonist” and claimed “the 1950s were a golden age”. The person who wrote this query should have been, well, more specific, and wrote “the golden age of sci-fi” because that I don’t really have qualms with. 

Although I would argue the 60s, there were plentiful great gems from Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov that came out of that 50s era from the sci-fi genre. Yet since the query writer left out that “of sci-fi”, I otherwise would have had no idea and I almost stopped reading the query right there. The 50s? A golden age? When, in the USA, the 50s saw segregation and racial tensions at an all-time high? When the mafia was still running rampant? When ‘the nuclear family’ model forced women into the household? When the US was beginning to exert its power as an imperial domino? When the Cold War brought the threat of nuclear weaponry at any given moment? That golden age? You should read The Other America by Michael Harrington.

The query later draws comparisons between the book and Red Dawn, that 1980s movie starring Patrick Swayze about a group of renegade teens who fight Russian and Cuban invaders attacking the US mainland. 

Now, while I do give Red Dawn the benefit of the doubt, being as it is genuinely trying to be a staple of American patriotism, trying to revitalize that ‘underdog mentality’ that birthed the nation in the first place, it’s a pretty horribly directed movie all-things considered, and remarkably unrealistic for its bleak tone. While, yes, at the time in 1984, the average citizen had no idea if the Russians or Cubans would ever actually invade the US mainland when they hadn’t for forty years following WWII, looking back at it with the benefit of hindsight in 2022, the movie is terribly outdated. Also, knowing what we know now, painting America as an underdog when it had been a superpowered juggernaut politically and militarily, simply comes across as sheer propaganda now. Even its remake in 2012 that attempted to make the story more modern was also a directorial nightmare and should never have graced a cinema screen.

The actual book that was being pitched was a dystopian teen space sci-fi that had strong opening chapters, and when I actually read the chapters, I realized it had nowhere near the same vibe as Red Dawn and had a completely different feel from most 50s sci-fi, after all, we have the benefit of modern technology and politics to make more accurate futuristic space predictions than the human race. As great as 2001: A Space Odyssey and the Back to the Future trilogy were, what holds them back is how far off the mark their predictions were.

When I talked with this particular author, he was beginning to doubt whether these professional query writers really knew what they were doing, and for a legitimate reason, as this was a terrible query for all the wrong reasons. While it hits the checkmark for having all the key elements of a query, and is even formatted accurately and spell-checked for grammar, it did a horrible job at the most important part – pitching the book.

In my personal belief, authors should be the ones writing their own query. In my experience, while yes, it is beneficial – and not to mention, faster – to query with more game-accurate templates and professional language, I’m much more willing to accept someone’s submission if the story is actually a good sell to a publisher or its message is something I feel very strong about. 

If I read the chapters themselves, the manuscript should have gone through a couple rounds of edits – professionally or personally – so that once I do my job as an editorial agent to do my own round of edits, there isn’t much extra work or time spent to get to the next step of finding the right editor at a publisher and submitting the manuscript.

In some cases, for authors who genuinely do not know how to write a professional query letter, I won’t flat out say no to hiring someone to write it for you, but I would discourage it for the reason that you are depending on those people to accurately pitch your book when no one knows your book better than yourself.

You are the only one who can give the most honest and authentic description of your book.

Not to mention, how you pitch and describe your book to an agent will often be the basis for how that agent pitches and sells your book to a publisher, so the agent makes sure they do not mince words and that they have the author’s best vision for the book in mind. 

I’d also like authors to save their money. If you’re seeking a traditional deal anyway, this is a process all about making sure the author gets their money upfront for their hard work. You shouldn’t be paying your budget at this stage for simply querying, in my opinion. If you’re going to pay someone, pay an editor to look at your novel. A professional edit, in my estimation, is at least 3x more likely to land you an agent than a professional query.

I would recommend, even if you did end up paying for your query to be professionally written, to please proofread and ask yourself “is this really the right description for my story?” You want to give yourself the best chance possible, and if you’re running around querying potentially the right agents for your book with the wrong message, it will be a colossal waste of time, money, and effort on your part.

Of course, this is just one small example, and even mentioned to the author who sent me that query that myself or the other agents who sent rejections may just not have been the right fit for the vision of this book, and in the hands of a different agent, they may see it different. It could be purely circumstantial, but this was the first case I’ve really seen a query that was this dramatically different from the actual book itself.