The Query Letter That Worked

"Worked" implies a reductive framing, but it did net a 66% request rate.

Hello friends!

Remember back in September, when I announced that I had signed with a literary agent, and then I said my next newsletter would be about my query letter? Remember how I did not do that?

I have a tendency toward magical thinking, and after posting that newsletter, I got superstitious and flinchy. I was in the middle of agent edits. I would (hopefully) be going on submission soon. What if I drew attention to my novel by palavering about it in this newsletter and somehow cursed myself???

Well, I am now no longer superstitious! Do I Have A Piece Of News For You!!!

…Unfortunately, that piece of news is not in this newsletter, lol. But I will do what I said I’d do four months ago and tell you how I constructed my query letter, back when I was looking for an agent.

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I actually thoroughly dislike the framing of “the query letter that worked.” I mean, what do you mean by “worked”? I’ve had query letters that “worked” for previous books and those books still didn’t get signed. Even in this particular case, I’m a bit of an outlier.

But I do think that writing a good query letter is a helpful way to hone in on what your book is about, and what about it you want to highlight. In a circular way, being able to laser-focus on that — whether by writing a good query, or through some other exercise or practice — can also make your book better. After all, if you’re highlighting something in the query, chances are you want it highlighted in the novel, too. I actually like to start noodling on how I’ll shape my query letter when I’m brainstorming a novel, partly in a mercenary way, but also because it helps me shine a spotlight on the most exciting parts of my book idea, which makes it easier to draw those parts out in the actual storytelling.

And also, obviously, you can write a better query letter when you have an iron grip on what you’re doing with the book. So:

Start with QueryShark

Ten years ago or so, I went through the full QueryShark archives and took notes on everything that Janet Reid said to do in a query letter. I think you should do that! But basically, she encourages you to identify three things, and sum those things up in under 250 words:

• Who is your protagonist?

• Who is your antagonist?

• What are the stakes?

This next part isn’t going to make any sense to y’all because you haven’t read the novel, but in my case:

• Protagonist: Ophelia, a thirty-one-year-old adjunct professor

• Antagonist: Luke, Ophelia’s new boyfriend

• Stakes: Ophelia’s mother has dementia, and Ophelia needs to figure out a way to provide full-time care for her, like, yesterday

I also really wanted to highlight my favorite thing about the book, which is that it’s a “horror-tinged literary novel about the wedding-industrial complex.”

The First Draft

Here’s how I worked the above — protagonist, antagonist, stakes, hooky one-liner — into 250 words:

Reeling from her mother’s dementia diagnosis, Ophelia Cohen has put her life on hold to move her mother, kicking and screaming, into assisted living. Her only consolation is the knowledge that once her mother’s affairs are in order, she’ll be able to go back to her regular life.

But then Luke di Cascia, her mother’s strange new accountant, informs Ophelia that her mother is dead broke, and Ophelia can’t afford her care.

What’s more, after meeting Luke, Ophelia’s mother starts deteriorating faster than anyone would have believed possible. Forgetting Ophelia’s name, forgetting how to shower, forgetting how to speak.

Only Luke’s support, and the ghostly promise of the financial help he might be able to offer her mother, are keeping Ophelia afloat. So, driven by terror and desperation at the prospect of living with her mom forever, Ophelia finally caves to her mother’s decade-old wish for her: She gets a boyfriend. And, soon, fiancé. Luke.

But as Luke drags her deeper into a fever dream of wedding planning – flower selections; spreadsheets; the ruined, eyeless figure of Luke’s family Saint; dresses; guest lists; nightmares full of tangled vines – she cannot shake the sense there’s some force at work here far worse than a pushy boyfriend or her mother’s ruined mind.

If Ophelia doesn’t get married, her decaying mother will lose access to care.

But she’s no longer so sure that she’s willing – or able – to take care of her mother at the expense of herself.

I circulated this to a few folks for feedback, who tweaked some of the language. But I got the most helpful feedback from the agent I talked to at Bread Loaf, who looked at my query letter and then my synopsis and circled the top paragraph of my synopsis, which I had theretofore dismissed as backstory that would not fit in a query letter’s word count, and said, “This should all be in the query.” (I know most people don’t get to show their query letter to an actual agent, but if you do get in front of an agent at a conference or whatever, I think that showing them your most polished query letter is one of the best uses of your time.)

And I also got helpful feedback, albeit circularly, from my workshop at Bread Loaf, where I realized that the real stakes for Ophelia are not that she’ll have to take care of her mother, but that when her mother dies, she’ll be alone. (This is what I mean when I say that understanding your novel can help you write a better query letter, and vice versa!) And personally, I think that adding a tidbit about aloneness to my final query letter — which you’ll see in a second — is what really made it sing.

The Final Draft

Here’s where we ended up:

Dear [Name]:

Thirty-one-year-old Ophelia Cohen is moving her mother, freshly diagnosed with dementia, into assisted living. But Ophelia has two problems. One: She can’t afford her mother’s care. Two: Now that she’s really, truly losing her mother, she discovers she’s terrified of being alone.

So she gets engaged to Luke, the wealthy, forceful son of the owner of a local (and impalpably eerie) wedding venue, who’s conveniently the type of man her mother always wanted her to marry.

Soon, only Luke’s support, and the ghostly promise of his financial help, are keeping Ophelia afloat. But as she’s dragged deeper into both her mother’s worsening dementia and a fever dream of wedding planning – a fever dream not only of budgets and dresses and color schemes, but of nightmares full of tangled vines, and the haunting eyeless figure of Luke’s family Saint, and her own slowly slipping sanity – she cannot shake the sense that there’s a force at work here even crueler than a pushy boyfriend or her mother’s ruined mind.

If Ophelia gets married, she will be tethering herself to a man who will swallow her whole. But if she doesn’t get married, she’ll be unable to pay for her mother’s care – and worse, she’ll be alone again.

UNTIL DEATH is an 84,000-word novel about the impossible pressures of daughterhood and the wedding-industrial complex. It should appeal to readers of horror-tinged literary novels about our culture’s unattainable standards for women – books like Mona Awad’s ROUGE, Sierra Greer’s ANNIE BOT, and Jessamine Chan’s THE SCHOOL FOR GOOD MOTHERS.

I earned my MFA in fiction from the University of Mississippi, and my work has been published in PseudoPod, Fireside, Shoreline of Infinity, and elsewhere. I was also a Pitch Wars mentee with Sequoia Nagamatsu (HOW HIGH WE GO IN THE DARK) and Cole Nagamatsu (WE WERE RESTLESS THINGS). This year, I attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Thank you for your time and consideration!

Sincerely,

Mary Berman
mtgberman.com

I want to emphasize, though, that I think this query letter only did, like, max 30% of the work. I think the book itself was also marketable — I was careful to write for what I thought would be a broad audience, I hear horror’s getting hot, and when conceiving of the novel, I thought very hard about where it might sit on the shelf and what those comparison books were doing that I wanted mine to do, too. All the query letter really did was successfully reflect that early work.

News

ICYMI: My short story “St. Thomas Aquinas Administers the Turing Test,” about what it means to have a soul and also robots, was published in Diabolical Plots in December.

My essay “‘Selfish or Annoying’: Etiquette, Gender, and Race in Oops!: The Manners Guide for Girls” will be published in An American Girl Anthology (University Press of Mississippi) in mid-2025. I talked about it on their Instagram!

And — finally, finally, finally! — another piece of news is forthcoming ASAP. You should subscribe so you don’t miss it. Seriously, you should subscribe.