Query letters and plot summaries

Art design by Peg Ihinger

Mary Kuhner asked: When you’re writing a short intro for a query letter, how far into the plot do you normally go?

It depends on the book and what the submission directions say. What the particular publisher says in their submission directions always trumps any and every other bit of advice you have seen anywhere, ever. If they say to query with a five-page outline, that’s what you do. If they ask for a letter, and don’t specify anything else, they usually want about one page that includes all the pertinent information. (And, obviously, the more room they give you, the more details you can include.)

“Pertinent information” includes a short paragraph about the author (name, prior professional sales, any relevant experience—meaning, if the book is a military action-adventure, do mention that you are a former Marine; if it is an English country house cozy romance…don’t—any endorsements by well-known writers the editor is likely to recognize, etc.), basic information about the manuscript (title, approximate word count, genre, whether it is finished), and, of course, the story summary.

For a standard query letter, this means that you have roughly one to three paragraphs in which to cover all 80,000-200,000 words of your novel, depending on how much pertinent information you have to include. About 90% of the advice on the internet will tell you that you should treat this just like writing the back blurb on a paperback novel. This intuitively makes sense—most people have seen enough back blurbs to be familiar with them, and they both have severely limited space to cover the high points of a story.

Unfortunately, this advice is wrong.

Query letter summaries and back blurbs certainly do have a lot of similarities, but they serve slightly different purposes. A back blurb is trying to persuade readers to buy the book by convincing them that they will enjoy reading it. Back blurbs try to give a general sense of the story setup, without spoiling too much of the plot.

A query summary is trying to persuade an acquiring editor to buy the manuscript by convincing him/her that his/her company will be able to sell this book to lots of other readers. Query summaries try to provide the editor with enough information for them to make an acquisition decision. Avoiding spoilers is counter-productive.

What the editor needs to know, broadly speaking, is who the protagonist is, what their main problem is, how they solve it, and what makes the story enjoyable, interesting, or entertaining. After that, you add whatever interesting details you have room for, like how the protagonist got into this mess in the first place or some of the things that happen on the way to getting

So a one-paragraph summary for a query letter might look something like this:

“When a tornado carries off her Kansas farmhouse (how protagonist got into this mess), ten-year-old Dorothy Gale finds herself stranded in the magical Kingdom of Oz. Determined to return home to her aunt and uncle, she sets out with her dog, Toto, to find some way back. (Protagonist and central problem. This is usually as much as would be covered in a back blurb, to avoid spoilers.) Along the way, she befriends a talking scarecrow, a woodsman made of tin, and a cowardly lion, and faces down the evil Witch of the West. (Some interesting/entertaining things that happen on the way.) After her attempt to leave Oz in a stage magician’s hot air balloon fails, the good witch Glinda rewards Dorothy for helping her new friends by teaching her to use a pair of magic slippers, and she successfully returns to Kansas. (How the protagonist’s problem is solved.)

That’s usually all there’s room for, if you only have a paragraph. If you have more room, you add more details (if you’ve written a novel, you have plenty of them available). The hard part is often identifying the protagonist’s central problem.

The other common method of writing a story summary is to take the long version and cut it down until it fits the space you have. I find this far more difficult than starting with a one-sentence beginning-middle-end version and then expanding it to fit. The few times that I’ve had reason to work this way, I start with the novel and do a chapter-by-chapter summary of the key points, one paragraph per chapter. I usually end up with somewhere between ten pages and twenty-five pages of summary. I’ve only been asked for that much once, so the next step is cutting it down to a five-page version. If I need a two-page version, I cut down the five page version. If I need a one-page, I cut til I get that, and again, down to the one-to-three-paragraph version for a query letter. If I think I’m going to need an elevator pitch version (i.e., a one-sentence eleven-second summary), I cut down to that. “Difficult” does not begin to describe how I feel about this way of doing it, which is why I almost never work that way, but it’s the standard method for some writers, so I include it here.

Note that either way you choose to work, the summary has to still cover those same four things: the protagonist, the central story problem, the solution, and what makes this story interesting/entertaining/enjoyable. Simply saying “Along the way, Dorothy has many interesting and enjoyable adventures” does not cover that last point. Also, how you choose to phrase “what happens” depends on the book’s focus. For a character-centered story, you focus more on the effect events have on the main character and how they develop; for action-adventure, on the direness of the problem and the dramatic way the protagonist solves it.