Querying a Literary Agent, Then and Now

The Harris Literary Agency kept a short page of submission guidelines on its website, and the version preserved here was captured in February 2009, near the end of the site's life. It is a plain document. It asks for a query first, sets a font size, insists on a stamped envelope, and warns the writer not to telephone. Read beside the agency's About page and its showcase of manuscripts, it tells you a good deal about how a small agency sorted its mail in the years before most of this moved to e-mail and online forms.

What the agency asked for

The archived submission guidelines open with a rule and a reproach. Query first, by e-mail or conventional mail, never by phone or fax. Then the reproach:

Query guidelines are often overlooked by the less experienced author. Guidelines are provided for a specific purpose and should be followed to the letter.

The query itself was to contain a one to two page description of the work plus the author's pertinent biography, neatly typed in a 12 point font, with accurate spelling and proper punctuation. The writer was to say what the work was about without hype, include the ending, and give the number of words and pages. A stamped self-addressed envelope went in with it; without one, the page said, don't expect a response. E-mail was tolerated for those who, in the agency's phrase, exercised cybernetic skill, but the message was to stay short, 200 to 300 words. After sending, the writer was to wait. No calls, no follow-up messages.

Only if the query tweaked the agency's interest did the second stage begin: a synopsis of two to five pages and a portion of the manuscript, usually three chapters or fifty pages, reviewed for writing style, editing and story line. The rules for that package were physical. Times New Roman or Courier, double spaced, pages loose and held with a rubber band, shipped in a 9x12 box, never bound, stapled or perforated, never sent by a carrier that demanded a signature. A typewriter was out, because changes would be required. The description was to be one page, and it was not to claim that the book would be a best seller, a blockbuster movie, or the first of six sequels.

What stands out, reading it now, is how much of the page is about respect for the reader's time. The agency's About page said Barbara J. Harris had worked as an editor for a number of years and had seen many excellent manuscripts fail to reach publication, and that the agency meant to manage a limited clientele of fine writers. Every rule on the guidelines page is a way of making that reading faster.

What a query letter does

A query letter is a business letter with one purpose: to get a stranger to ask for more pages. It answers three questions in order. What is this? Who wrote it? Why should this agent, of all the people you could have written to, read it? The agency's guidelines map onto those questions almost exactly: the description, the pertinent biography, the word count and the category that let an agent place the book on a shelf in her head.

The archive's Published Works page, as updated in September 2008, gives a sense of the odds the agency itself was working against. It names ten domestic publications and a handful of foreign sales against the 245 listings preserved here, most of which name no publisher at all. The guidelines put it plainly: the odds of a first-time author being published are long.

That is why the page keeps returning to clarity and brevity. "Make sure it is clear and succinct," it says of the description. "Tell what the work is about and do not add hype." Hype, in the agency's sense, was any sentence about the book's prospects rather than its contents. The catalog preserved here contains examples of both kinds. One listing's description promises that the combination of its two plots makes the book "marketable to all readers of commercial fiction" before it has said who the main character is. Another begins, "The plot of 'The Men's Club' is simple: the writer discovers he has prostate cancer, has it removed, survives, is left incontinent, but is eventually cured. End of story." The second kind is what the guidelines were asking for.

The first lines carry it

An agent reading a stack of queries decides early, often within the first sentence or two, whether to keep reading with attention or to skim toward the end. The first lines of a pitch therefore do most of its work. They have to name a person and a pressure, and they have to do it in concrete terms.

The listings show how this looks when it works. Kristie Klemme's description of Brother's Keeper opens: "It took an instant for her baby brother to die, but it took half a lifetime for her to forgive herself." One sentence, and the reader knows the event, the person, the span of the book and its emotional subject. Suzanne Blaney's description of So The River Flows, at 89 words one of the shortest in the catalog, gets a woman out of a violent marriage, into pre-war Paris, through the German invasion and on to Hollywood without a wasted clause. Compare the descriptions that open with the state of the world or a block of figures before any character appears; the reader has to work to find the story, and a tired reader will not.

The same discipline governs other short, high-stakes documents, and the advice travels. A guide to strong opening lines for a personal statement makes the point from the admissions side: a specific first sentence earns the second one, and a general first sentence spends it. A query needs that line, and then it needs to stop embellishing and tell the rest plainly.

The opening must also promise the ending. The guidelines ask for it by name in the query and in the one-page description, and for the entire story in the synopsis; an agent is not a reader to be teased, and she needs to know whether the book resolves before committing hours to the pages. Several listings here close on a cliffhanger instead, and beside the guidelines they look like a missed instruction.

How titles get chosen

The catalog is also a record of 245 title decisions. Most of them follow a few patterns that still hold. Some borrow a phrase with weight already in it: Kathryn Kuhlen's Death Rides a Pale Horse echoes a passage in Revelation, and John Lemza's I, Ebenezer borrows a character from Dickens and lets the pronoun do the rest. Some name a technical term and trust the reader to be curious: James Fontana's courtroom thriller is called Reverse Onus, and the techno-thriller about an astronaut stranded in orbit is The Hohmann Transfer, after the orbital manoeuvre. Some simply state the subject, as in Paul Mark Tag's Category 5. And a few argue with the reader from the cover: Barry Thomsen's small-business guide, When the Shit Hits the Fan!, or Rob Burns's Smith, Smythe, What's the Difference?

Non-fiction titles in the showcase lean on subtitles to carry the promise. Larry Forness's book is Don't Get Duped, then a dash, then A Consumer's Guide to Health and Fitness. Scott MacMillan's The Big Game appears on its listing with the subtitle 10 Strategies for Winning at Life, and on the Published Works page without the number, a small reminder that subtitles are the most negotiable part of a title and often the last part settled.

The questions behind these choices are the same ones a student faces with a much shorter piece. Does the title name the subject or the feeling? Does it promise something the text delivers? Will a reader who sees only the title want the next sentence? A short guide on choosing a title for an essay works through those questions in the same order an agent or an editor would, and the answers scale up to a novel without much change. The agency's guidelines do not mention titles at all, which is itself informative: the title was expected to be on the manuscript already, and it was expected to be the author's.

Then and now

Much of the 2009 page is now obsolete in its particulars. The stamped envelope, the 9x12 box, the rubber band, the ban on signature-required carriers, the mention of typewriters: these belong to a postal era that agencies have largely left. Queries go by e-mail or through online forms, and sample pages are pasted below the letter or attached.

What has not changed is the substance. Agents still ask writers to read and follow the guidelines on their own pages. They still want a short, specific description that names the protagonist and the stakes, a biography that includes only what is pertinent, a word count, and a category. They still dislike hype and still want the synopsis to include the ending.

The archive keeps the page because it is a clear statement of that substance from a working agency. The Harris Literary Agency no longer accepts queries at this address, and this archive is not the agency: it accepts no queries or manuscripts, the postal and e-mail details have been removed, and it represents no one and forwards nothing. The Authors' Showcase and the A to Z index are what remains of the agency's display of manuscripts: the descriptions, kept as the agency published them.