querying

This Query Letter Method Has a Guaranteed 1% Success Rate!

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

Literary agents: can’t live with ‘em, can’t deal directly with a publisher without getting a restraining order and needing to change your legal name without ‘em.

Writers hate writing query letters for many good reasons: fear of rejection, difficulty distilling a 200,000 word novel into a few sentences, lack of confidence in your salesmanship stemming from the constant death threats you got as an eighteen-year-old telemarketer.

It’s best to think of query letter writing as toadying up to a sick relative in the hopes they’ll include you in their will. So we’ll look at how to put on our best smile and ignore that awful smell and disgusting goiter, so to speak, on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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Maybe you need a letter opener. Perfect for creating quick easy access to your mail and for defending yourself against belligerent guests who won’t stop complaining about the smell of your office, you can’t go wrong without a letter opener. Visit your local office supply store for more information.

Before we start, let’s look at what we want a query letter to do. A query letter needs to seduce a prospective agent into believing that you’re going to make them money. Much like a pimp would look at a young man or woman’s body, posture, relationship with law enforcement and tolerance to various illegal substances, an agent will look at your writing credentials, tone, hook and ideas to decide if your book will sell or not.

Here are the main do’s and dont’s for query letter writing.

Do: Sell yourself

Mention any previous publishing credits you have. Mention if you have an MFA. Mention any academic honors related to writing. If you don’t have any of those, and YouTube analytics tells me that’s likely, then simply lie and make them up.

Worried about getting caught. No problem: Just create phony websites for bogus publishers. Write phony press releases and create fake book review sites with very positive reviews of your phony book. Then buy some burner cell phones and list the numbers on your website. Get good at different accents in case they call. Most importantly, whatever you do, don’t be yourself.

Don’t: Reveal too much about yourself

You don’t want to share too much with the agent you’re querying or appear too chummy. Despite everything else I’ll tell you in this video, literary agents are just people like you and me and they’ll see through obvious manipulation.

When I was first starting out, I’d often make the mistake of mentioning I became a writer because a favorite aunt had wished it on her death bed. My hope was to guilt trip the agent into considering my manuscript, but I learned that came off as needy.

Literary agents, I’ve found, also don’t care about what inspired you to write this book, what you or your girlfriend look like naked, what you think the literary agent might look like naked, the models from your vintage typewriter collection, or copies of floor plans of the office where the literary agent works.

Do: Research the agent you’re querying

This is a time-consuming process and you don’t want to waste your time querying an agent who represents, for example, hardcore queer erotica when you’re writing a pastry cookbook. (Though it’s a common mistake, it turns out.)

You also want to make sure your agent actually has connections and works for a reputable agency. If your agent gave you the address of an abandoned office, speaks with a thick Indian accent, their webcam is constantly broken and asks to be paid in Apple gift cards, you might want to ask LinkedIn if Tom Everyman’s profile is legitimate.

Don’t: Forget to proofread

If you can’t get through a one-page letter without a myriad of spelling mistakes and subject-verb confusion, what’s the likelihood you wrote a book that’s going to sell. You don’t want to, for example, say that you wrote this book because your “favorite cunt requested on her death bed.”

Do: Create a strong hook

Just like your book, your query letter needs to start off with a bang. Your hook should answer these three questions. Who is your character? What do they want? What is stopping them from getting it? In my 2009 romantic comedy Just the Tip, I used this hook: Dan Stevens is a down-on-his-luck tax auditor who is forced to audit the woman of his dreams, a young waitress at his favorite Chinese restaurant. And just when he thinks it can’t get any worse, his wife starts asking questions.

Don’t: Try to sympathize with your agent

Don’t say things like “I know you’re very busy” or “I’m sure you must get tired of looking at 1000s of these every day” or “I bet you’d like a nice strong man to rub your shoulders after a stressful day.” Trust me: I’ve tried begging, I’ve tried offering sexual favors or hiring other people to provide them, I’ve tried bribing them, I even wasted a whole month getting one agent’s son released from prison.

But I’ve come to learn one thing. Literary agents are soulless automatons. Now, does the job make them this way or does it merely attract psychopaths who get off on crushing other people’s dreams, is hard to say. Either way, it’s best to think of them as a necessary evil, like a colonoscopy, paying taxes or having to sell your book on a platform owned by a company that forces workers to piss in bottles.  

Here are a few more quick do’s and don’t’s.

Do: Demand writers in your local author group give you copies of their successful query letters and do fake cry if they won’t.

Don’t: Try to stand out by sending a query letter in a strange font like Papyrus or Wingdings.

Do: If you’re querying a male agent, mention things like football and beer, and if you’re querying a female agent, mention things like menstrual cramps and Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

Don’t: Mail a query letter signed in blood to show how serious you are.

How I Sold My First Book

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

Intelligence.

Talent.

Creativity.

You won’t need any of these things to succeed as a writer so I want you to put them out of your mind. At its most basic, selling books is about sales, not literature. And selling books is no different than selling anything else, be it cars, Girl Scout cookies or your dad’s retirement watch. It’s about market research, getting your name out there and not being afraid to use a little sex appeal. I’ll teach you how to pump up those numbers and always be closing on this edition of Stories’ Matter.


Okay, today’s article will be broken into five steps, and at the end of each section, I will take you through my personal journey of how I sold my first book.


Step One: Find your market

I’ll be blunt. Publishers don’t give a shit about literary quality. And just like my dad used to say to that strange woman who lived with us for six months, the only reason they want you around is to make them money.


You should be able to answer these questions for your publisher: Who will buy your book? How will you hook them? Can you make them feel like they’ll regret it if they die before they read your book?


Now full disclosure, I landed my first book deal in 1999, a simpler and more innocent time: Borders was still around, nobody knew who al-Qaeda was and people didn’t carry around little machines made them constantly anxious, depressed and seething with self-hatred. Also, I should mention I technically had actually been published before this, but it was by a very fringe publisher that I don’t think counts. (As an aside some of my critics will claim this group was the media wing of an AIDS-denial group, like the one that promoted Foo Fighters early on. But they actually thought all diseases were a hoax, so it’s a little disingenuous to single out AIDS.)


Anyway, my first real book deal with a company that actually had an office was in 1999. The book was called Spilled Milk, a psychological thriller about a man named John Milk who snaps and murders everyone in his office. Back in the 1990s people worked in stable office jobs like this and I was able to convince my publisher readers would connect with John Milk’s alienation and discontent.


Step Two: Make a name for yourself

Agents and publishers are risk-averse. They almost never go with an unknown. Fun fact, when JK Rowling submitted one of her manuscripts to publishers under a different name, over 140 of them turned down her story about a transsexual woman who rapes an entire class of kindergartners.


So what do you do if you’re not already famous? Well, most people assume you can skip this step, meet a literary agent at a bar, sleep with them, smash your face against their bathroom mirror and threaten to call the police if they don’t promise you a book deal. But unfortunately, almost all literary agents bug their apartments to prevent incidents like these.


After I had written Spilled Milk, I made a name for myself by stopping a homeless man from jumping in front of a train in my hometown. I made the local news and even got some very brief national news coverage. I wasn’t exactly a celebrity, but it was enough to convince my publisher people might vaguely recognize the name. It is unfortunate, however, that the same homeless man jumped in front of a different train a month later after he ran through the money I gave him to jump in front of the first one.


Step Three: Find an agent

Going back to what I said earlier, if you can’t blackmail agents, how can you land one? Well, it all starts with a query letter. You can find my video on that here.


But queries and proposals and sample chapters are all a little impersonal. You need to find a way to make a true connection. This is a person you might be working with for months, hell maybe even decades if you have a few dozen books in you. My first agent introduced me to my first and second wives at the same underground sex club, and he’d still be my agent today if he’d taken my advice and had someone always there to spot him when doing autoerotic asphyxiation.


But how did I land him? Well, it wasn’t by mailing a manuscript and it wasn’t by sending an email, which was all the rage in the late 90s. And no, it wasn’t the underground sex club, where you’re not allowed to use your real identity anyway. No, I met him at a writer’s convention in upstate New York. These are great places to network. When nobody was looking, I started a small fire near his booth and, because I was ready and most writers are useless, I quickly put it out. One thing led to another and twelve years later I was a pallbearer at his funeral. Funny how life is sometimes.


Step Four: Have a self-marketing plan

Repeat after me: Your book will not sell itself. It’s true now and it’s always been true. Nobody would’ve read Moby Dick if Melville hadn’t convinced Nye’s to give away a free copy with every case of sperm oil.
There’s a lot of great information about building your author brand in this video here, but just to go over the basics: write an author tagline, network, and if you’re really fucking ugly, develop your online platform as much as possible.

Today, a marketing plan might involve some of these things: setting up a blog, promoting your book in advance on social media and in YouTube videos, tweeting inane ramblings at 3 in the morning and so on.
Things were different in 1999, but still might apply today. For Spilled Milk, my plan was to set up a book tour along the east coast and put up some controversial billboard ads along the New Jersey turnpike.


Step Five: Choose the best deal

This section of the video will apply to only a very small minority of you, so if you’re not completely confident, driven and borderline delusional about your ability to succeed, you can skip to the end of the video. Okay, for those that stayed, you’ve got several different publishers vying for your attention. It’s prom all over again, except this time won’t end with you having to scrape your limo driver’s brains off the pavement.


Now, for a new author a normal advance will be somewhere between 100,000 dollars and 20 bucks. But you have to read the fine print. The biggest advance won’t always earn you the most money. You can’t forget to look at the royalty structure.


For Spilled Milk, I was offered a $5,000 dollar advance, which in Joe Biden’s America is almost $700,000 today. I was over the moon. You know, I was able to pay off my loan sharks and I had enough money left over to buy Maxwell Caulfield’s leather coat from Grease 2.


But what I didn’t realize was that instead of getting royalties, the contract I signed stated that I’d actually have to pay 20 cents for each book sold. I ended up disowning the book and actively telling people not to buy it on my book tour.