Picasso and the Query Letter from James W. Ziskin

What tips do you have to get your query letter noticed and pulled from the slush pile?

Panning for gold in the slush pile

I’m no expert at this, and I worry that any advice I offer may be repeating what Dietrich and Terry put forth earlier this week. But since the gauntlet has been thrown…

My number one personal observation on queries is this: You can lose a lot of points by submitting them the wrong way. The sad truth, however, is that you don’t necessarily win any points for doing them the right way either. 

But at least you don’t lose any.

So what can/should you do to increase your odds of getting an agent or editor to Bite and ask for a partial or complete manuscript?

For starters, DON’T USE A STUPID FONT LIKE THIS ONE!

Try something safe. Maybe Times New Roman or Arial, depending on whether you prefer your text avec or sans serif.

Next…

• Give the reader a reason to read on. If nothing else, your query must compelling.
• To that end, find a hook. A snappy, irresistible opening might intrigue the reader. Sometimes it’s risky to…well…take a risk. But it just might pay dividends. 
• Get to the point right away. The finger is hovering over the delete button... Don’t waste time.
• Be concise. Bauhaus it.
• Be professional and confident. You’re a writer. Show that you’re a professional one. No one ever said, “Oh, this is just too professional. I think I’ll pass.” But one certainly might say, “This is amateurish. I’ll pass.”
• Do your research. Would you send your erotica to an editor who publishes YA?
• Personalize your pitch. Find an agent who likes books like yours and let them know you’ve done your homework.
• Chek yore speling

Now, the best advice I can offer for getting an agent:

If possible, BE RECOMMENDED BY AN EXISTING CLIENT. This won’t guarantee an offer of representation, but it’s almost like getting a private audience. The agent will shut out other distractions—at least for a few moments—and consider your query a touch more receptively. The rest is up to you and your writing.

And, of course, there are some obvious DON’Ts:

• Don’t predict great sales and awards. You’ll sound arrogant or uninformed. Or both.
• By the way, don’t be arrogant. The same goes for entitled and obnoxious. 
• Don’t present yourself with a chip on your shoulder. The writing biz is hard to break into. You’re not the only one swimming upstream, and agents/editors don’t owe you anything.
• Don’t send a form letter. That’s the quickest and surest way to get a rejection.
• Don’t use AI. That’s lazy. And it’s not you besides, is it?
• Don’t try to be cute. (Unless you REALLY are.) Which you’re not.

In sum, don’t lose points by taking chances!

Unless… your pitch is soooo irresistible and breaks all the rules in the right way. I like to use the example below. The two paintings are by the same artist, Picasso. What’s more—believe it or not—they show the same model, his first wife, Olga. The lesson, of course, is that Picasso knew how to draw and paint before he decided to break the rules and create something daring and different. Writers should do the same. (By the way, I believe he and Olga separated shortly after the second painting… Make of that what you will.)

Finally, to echo Terry’s nod to the late Janet Reid earlier this week, I propose you visit Janet’s Query Shark website immediately and often. It constitutes a veritable post-graduate course on query writing. And it’s absolutely free. Janet was a tough teacher, but one who truly wanted to help writers. She was never my agent, but she was someone I always enjoyed meeting and chatting with at conferences. She was generous with her support and advice. I considered her a friend and I miss her.

Here’s the address: https://queryshark.blogspot.com/

Until we meet again, happy querying! (With a normal font and color, of course.)

 *****************

THE PRANK…enigmatic and unnerving. The pace never flags for a second. This is some masterly plotting. I loved it.”

—Liz Nugent, author of Strange Sally Diamond

 

THE PRANK. A picture clipped from Playboy magazine, a missing Swiss Army Knife, and a prank gone terribly wrong conspire to make Christmas 1968 a deadly holiday to remember.

 

“The Holdovers meets The Bad Seed,” THE PRANK features a charming but volatile thirteen-year-old named Jimmy Steuben. He befriends his seventh-grade English teacher, Patti Finch, just days after her boyfriend is killed in an electrocution accident while hanging Christmas lights on his roof. Patti desperately needs respite from her grief, and a chance encounter with Jimmy provides just that. Ignoring the dangers of a potential scandal, the mismatched pair begins spending time together over Christmas break. Patti finds solace in Jimmy’s company; Jimmy discovers desire and infatuation. But what Patti doesn’t know is that it was Jimmy who caused the tragic accident that killed her lover.

From two-time Edgar Award finalist, Anthony, Barry, and Macavity award-winner James W. Ziskin, THE PRANK releases July 2026.

PLACEHOLDER—NOT THE OFFICIAL COVER

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Tip the scales

What tips do you have to get your query letter noticed and pulled from the slush pile?

By Dietrich

You’ve poured your soul into the manuscript, polished it until it sparkles, bled on the keyboard, cried over plot holes until the wee hours, and finally declared it done. But you’re not done. You have to write a stand-out query letter, not to mention a second-to-none synopsis worthy of the back of the novel, and/or an elevator pitch with a killer hook. You’ll need the pitch for when you meet a writer you admire at the next convention, and they ask what your book’s about. The last thing you want to do is freeze like a deer in the headlights (been there, done that).

A killer query gets you read, but weak pages and pitches get you rejected fast.

Your opening needs to punch them in the feels. Introduce your protagonist, their goal, the conflict, and the stakes. Never start with “In a world where love is forbidden...”

Use comp titles—“The Office meets Practical Magic”—but pick realistic ones. Skip “It’s the next Harry Potter but better” unless you want your email deleted instantly.

Don’t call your novel “hilarious, heart-wrenching, and groundbreaking.” Let the pitch do the work. Agents decide if it’s good; you just need to make them curious enough to want to read it.

Voice is king in the slush pile, just like in the novel.

Mention writing credentials, relevant experience, or fun facts that tie into the book. No need for your life story. Skip “I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was…”

Never ever predict your future bestseller status or movie deals.

Agents and publishers are drowning in query letters. Yet a few manage to get fished out, manuscripts get requested, and shiny book deals get signed.

Don’t blast the same query to every agent with a pulse. Agents and publishers can smell a mass email from a mile off, and it’ll get an instant eye-roll, followed by a tap of the delete key.

Follow guidelines exactly. Don’t ever ever ever misspell the agent’s or publisher’s name. And don’t add attachments when the guidelines said no.

Dig into their “Manuscript Wishlist” and check recent sales. Oh, and verify the sale: Use Publishers Marketplace to confirm the agent actually made the sale (And it wasn't just a book they praised on social media). Personalize the opening: “I’m querying you specifically because you rep [similar author/book] and mentioned loving [trope/element] in your recent interview.”

Match the vibe: If the agent's wishlist uses casual, enthusiastic language (e.g., “I'm dying for a goblin market romance!"), match that specific phrasing in your trope mention.

If nothing else, this shows you’re not lazy. And hopefully, it’ll flatter them without seeming creepy or too obvious.

One page. Seriously. Walls of text get skimmed or skipped.

Use short paragraphs, Arial 12, and get to the point. Hook → Book pitch → Bio → Thanks and goodbye. If it spills onto page two, cut it back to one.

Make the subject line clear and professional. No fancy fonts, colors, or creative formatting. This is a business letter, not a page in a scrapbook.

Tweak the query based on any feedback before you send out the next round.

Time it right: Avoid December holidays and peak summer.

Understand that great books get rejected all the time. But a sharp, personalized, error-free query with a compelling pitch increases your odds. For one thing, it shows respect for the agent’s time and signals you’re a professional.

Write the best damn book you can, then query like you mean it. And if it doesn’t work the first round, revise and try again. Persistence plus craft beats luck every single time.

Please, I'm Begging

 

Terry here with our question of the week: 

What tips do you have to get your query letter noticed and pulled from the slush pile? 

Having queried and been turned down or ignored by 75 agents before I signed up with the agent who sold my first book, I’m not sure I’m the right person to give anybody tips. But here goes: 

 In my writers’ group we recently had a discussion about query letters. It seemed that different writers in the group had gotten different advice. What? Who knew there would be conflicting advice for writers? Sorry, I’m laughing as I write this. No advice, ever, to writers has ever been without a conflicting piece of advice. 

For example, “Never start with the weather.” 

                        But then, “It was a dark and stormy night.” And yes, I know that’s a cliché that has spawned a thousand hilarious entries in “worst first line” contests, but taken by itself, it sets a scene. 

 There is advice about point of view, number of characters, dialogue, setting, you name it. There will be conflicting advice. But none of it is as dire and contrarian as the advice about query letters. 

I used to have an agent, Janet Reid, who as gone on to that great Agent Firm in the Sky, who called herself The Query Shark. She critiqued query letters with great glee, and with unparrelled snarkiness. But also, with a heart. She wanted writers to succeed. Her point was usually—get to the point! 

 My advice is, take that advice. Get to the point. The agent knows you are looking for representation, so don’t be coy. 

“I’m seeking representation for my 200,000-word book, The Saintliness of the Writer. 

 Then, say what it’s about in a few sentences. “Writers are the unrecognized saints of the world. I’ve showcased sixteen writers whom I think deserve sainthood, and why.” 

 Then say why you are the person to write this book. “As a graduate of the seminary, I have studied saints and written numerous essays on the subject published in religious publications, so I am eminently qualified to write this book.” 

Then say who will be interested in reading it, mentioning any comparable books. “The book is written for the general public, and would be well-received, as it is in the same vein as the best-selling The Writer and His Demons. 

 Try to put some of your own personality into the query letter. That doesn’t mean you have to try to be funny, or super-smart, or self-effacing. Try to think of yourself as talking to the agent. Pleasantly. Not demanding. Not begging. Just requesting that they take you seriously. 

And finally, I have a bit of personal advice that I’ve rarely seen. In fact, I’ve seen the opposite advice: Include a blurb from a well-known writer if you can. I had a well-known writer read my book and give me a blurb before I sent out query letters. Bill Crider said he wasn’t sure how much good it would do, but he’d be happy to read it. He gave me a great blurb and I put it right up front in the letter. The first agent who took me on said that’s what had caught her eye. It can’t hurt. Or can it? I’m sure someone will tell you why it’s a terrible idea. Make of it what you will.

Deadlines and Discipline

If you have typically written for newspapers and magazines, what was the transition like for you when you wrote a novel?* 

I always wanted to be a novelist. I also understood it's not a 'paid profession'. I knew I needed a trade so I did a journalism cadetship on a small newspaper in Sydney and worked my way up to become the subeditor, then the editor. Next, I spent several years working on a teen girls magazine where I was the chief subeditor. This was followed by a job on the subbing desk of daily newspaper The Courier Mail in Brisbane. I liked working in news and magazine rooms. I liked the buzz, the people, the fast pace. 

Throughout this time - early mornings before work, late nights after work - I was writing novel drafts. Certainly, what I learned in the newsroom helped shape my writing style. 

Writing journalism is formulaic. You write to the inverted pyramid model, which means you start with the most important bit, and then add layers of information, in order of importance. The idea is that a busy subeditor can cut your story from the bottom up. Ideally, they could cut off any number of sentences from below, and the story above would still make sense. You need to provide the facts: Who, What, Where, When, Why, How. And, most crucially, when the reader has finished the story, they shouldn't have any questions. No plot holes. 

My novel writing style is quite journalistic. The risk with that, is that the writing is too bare. Early on, I learnt to slow my prose down, to let the story breathe. This was something I had to work at. Smells, memories, textures, emotions and lush descriptions are often not included in a hard news story, unless it's a colour quote from an interviewee. 

I also have a terrible habit of over-researching for my novels. Fact checking and triple checking things. I'm always reminding myself of Stephen King's advice about story coming first. For example, the history of a crumbling stone colonial building beside a river in the Tasmanian highlands doesn't really matter as much as the actions of the person who has arrived there to bury a body. 

Writing crime, or writing journalism, have similarities. A journalist must be curious and determined, and they also need to have empathy and integrity to do their job well. These are qualities that many crime fiction writers share. 

Crime writers and readers, just like journalists and their readers, desire to know the truth. Writing journalism, you're tasked with laying out the facts and letting the reader make their mind up. A good journalist gathers as many facts as they can, and arranges them in a way that is fair, and makes sense. They must ask tough questions, in order to get real answers. They can't embellish, or dramatise. The facts are all that is required. 

Deadlines and discipline are ingrained in me - I never waste my writing time. That's a good skill to have. Writing short - that's a skill I need to continue to practise.

Honestly, I wasn't a great news reporter. Often, I felt sorry for the mayor or a politician. When we were trying to dig up dirt on them, and expose them for the fun of a good headline, I felt mean. Journalists need to be tough. In the magazine world, I didn't like how we put our integrity aside for the sake of advertisers. Magazines are full of product placement, sometimes in very subtle ways. We'd push products on the teen readership, often playing on their anxieties about personal hygiene, appearance or wellbeing in doing so. I'm not completely proud of being part of that business model. 

I like fiction because it's more nuanced, and also, perpetrators often get punished in satisfying ways. Fiction mirrors real life, it's murky, morally complex, emotional and revealing. Crime fiction writers ask deeper questions, we might even ask the reader to empathise with a perpetrator, to walk in their shoes for a while, for example. Our role is to not just solve the crime, but to examine the consequences of the crime - what's the cost of justice, how are people affected by this, what does crime to a person. If you look at any village, town or city, the type of crimes that occur there are very revealing about what kind of place it is. Crime is a way to understand human nature, and to explore the ways that bad behaviour effects people and societies. 

*I tweaked this question to personalise it. The original question was: If you have typically written short stories and then wrote longer (novels or novellas), what was the transition like for you, and how did you teach yourself to take the leap and go long? 

But I've never written short stories, except in high school, and once when I wrote a story about a farmer from Cunnamulla and his awful children, a story that was submitted to, and rejected by the New Yorker. Being rejected by the New Yorker is an achievement and I saved my rejection letter as a writerly milestone.

The Venn Diagram of Short Story Writers, by Catriona

 If you have typically written short stories and then wrote longer (novels or novellas), what was the transition like for you, and how did you teach yourself to take the leap and go long? 

I went the other way. Well, pretty much. Back when the world was young and I started writing, I produced one very solemn autobiographical short story, full of darlings that should have been drowned in a bucket, then a PG Wodehouse pastiche, then a sitcom script. The two shorts are unpublished. The script got me a meeting at BBC Scotland. It even went into development. (As far as I know, it's still there.)

But then I resigned from my  job and started writing for real. And it was novels all the way. My first short story didn't appear until over ten years later when I was invited to contribute to an anthology. 

First ever published short story

In total, I've written fifteen short stories (and more than twice as many novels) mostly when asked to contribute something. I've only submitted three or four to a blind selection panel. Two got knocked back, one got accepted, one is pending. 

So the Venn diagram of current short mystery fiction writers would be a glorious super-imposed elliptical extravagangza of Michael Bracken, Barb Goffman, Art Taylor, Charlaine Harris . . . all that lot, and near the margin of the page, a rash of dots representing the writers whose short stories are squeezed out in homeopathically tiny doses. I'm one of those dots.

The main difference between writing short stories and writing novels, for me, is probably caused by not reading many shorts. That means - I think - that I'm not good at evaluating my own shorts. Weirdly, I always conclude that my completed story is a towering work of staggering genius. Truly. Every time, I think this is going to win awards. People are going to reel away stunned from the anthlogy this appears in, their heads fizzing with wonder and awe. (I wish I was kidding.) It's like those parents that put babies forward for modelling contracts, blinded by love, and are puzzled when the bundle resembling a boiled bulldog doesn't get the gig. 

swankiest anthology I've been in

Novels are different. I think I can place myself quite accurately in the league table of effectiveness: with - say - Rebecca at the top, shining and perfect, and couldn'tpossiblycomment down in the gutter, stinking. I know I'm not hopeless; I know I'm not Margaret Atwood.

But I find it very difficult to identify what makes a great short story. Sometimes, I read the winner of a prestigious award, or an entire issue of AHMM or EQMM and I don't get more than half of them. I probably need to take a class with Art Taylor.

Proudest short-story moment

It's just occurred to me that I'm spilling this having written the introduction to more than one anthology of shorts. I've even got another introduction coming soon. But when I read as an intro-writer, I'm using a different bit of my brain, a bit that finds it easy to identify the strengths and charm in every piece of writing. It's when I sit back with a cup of tea and read as a reader that I feel lost in the weeds. Lucky they're not very tall weeds. You know, because they're short.

Lucky, too, that it's the output of a few days' or weeks' work that I submit thinking it's astonishingly brilliant, only to get a "Yeah, naw" response. It would be much worse if that happened after a year's slog on a novel. The developmental edit is humbling enough for me any day.

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The Leap by Eric Beetner

 If you have typically written short stories and then wrote longer (novels or novellas), what was the transition like for you, and how did you teach yourself to take the leap and go long? 

I wrote short stories for a while before I tackled a novel, sure. My big transition, however, was going from screenplays to novels.

A feature-length script is structurally similar enough to a novel that it didn’t feel like stretching out a story beyond its limits. Screenplays are much more skeletal, more efficient and are a desert of specific details, though. My biggest fear was that I’d never be able to fill in all that missing stuff that becomes the job of the director, the costumer, the set designer and the actors.

I needn’t have worried. When you write a movie you play that film in your head the entire time. You trust that the other collaborators will see the same set as you, hear the same sounds, and get the same nuance, but it's all there for you in your mind. Now comes the job of putting it down on paper. In many ways, it's freeing to not have to rely on someone else's interpretation of what they think you meant. For those several hundred pages, you are the director, the cinematographer, the editor and all the way down the line.

Story structure is key no matter what the final medium. You can write a novel, a script or a 10-part podcast and you’ll still be following same rules and instincts for your overall story. Learning about story as I did mostly from the movies, I paid close attention to where certain beats landed, how long a story could sustain moments of tension and suspense, how long to linger after a resolution (hint: not long).

Short stories are often a quick slice of a larger story. It follows a mantra I use daily in my film editing work which is to get into a scene as late as possible and get out as early as you can. When you have the luxury of the word count to do a set up, backstory, scene setting, etc. then go for it, but also do it in moderation. The biggest lesson I get from screenwriting and from shorts is that so much of that stuff isn’t necessary in the end. If it is missing, we’ll be fine without it. The reader can do a lot of the work on their own and it makes for more active engagement with a story.

I bristle against anyone who thinks they need 1000 pages to tell a fully developed story. Anyone who has a favorite movie knows that a complete story with all the info you need about characters, setting, motivation and resolution can be done in 90 minutes. In a word count, that script would probably fall somewhere in the 20-30K word range, that’s it. But the story can be fully satisfying in that short amount of time.

When I started writing novels and I realized I could fill in those details while still keeping things moving along, my confidence soared. My first novel is still in a drawer somewhere never to be seen by human eyes, but still…

Approaching the story from that same place of giving a fully-realized tale doesn’t change based on the format of your final product. Even in a short story. If you know what you’re driving toward in a short, then you know when you’ve gotten there. Many of the most powerful short tales end on that moment of impact (think Rod Serling) The twist or revelation that may drive a novel into a second act, should be the conclusion to a short story. It’s okay to want to know what happens next. 

Moving from a short to a novel is often no more than following that desire to the next step and seeing where it leads. It’s why so many novels begin as short stories that spin out into something larger.

So for me, it wasn’t so much a leap as just continuing to walk forward and trace that story where it wanted to go.

A Novel Is Not a Short Story With Better Cardio

 

If you have typically written short stories and then wrote longer (novels or novellas), what was the transition like for you, and how did you teach yourself to take the leap and go long? 

For years, I thought writing a novel was just writing a short story with better cardio.

 

This turned out to be deeply untrue.

 

The metaphor that finally made sense to me came from music. A short story feels like a solo piece: tight, intentional, built around a single emotional line. A novel feels more like a symphony. Not because it’s more sophisticated, but because it has room for recurrence. Themes return. Variations emerge. One section can breathe while another carries tension.

 

In a short story, readers can hold the entire thing in their head at once. In crime fiction especially, that compression is powerful. A clue dropped on page two still feels warm on page twelve. If the story lands, it lands all at once. The box clicks shut.

 

A novel doesn’t work that way.

 

Energy dissipates over distance. Characters vanish for chapters. Readers forget the bartender with the nervous habit you thought was unforgettable. You don’t just establish motifs in a novel — you reintroduce them, reshape them, remind the reader why they mattered in the first place.

 

I learned this the hard way.

 

My first attempt at a novel read like a short story that had swallowed several smaller short stories whole. Every chapter arrived with the intensity of a final act. Every conversation sounded like somebody had fifteen minutes left to live. Individually, the scenes worked. Together, they exhausted each other.

 

That’s another thing nobody tells short story writers moving into novels: pacing isn’t only about speed. It’s about permission.

 

A novel permits digression, delay, atmosphere, and secondary rhythms. In mystery writing, that can feel almost irresponsible at first. You spend years learning economy: hide the clue cleanly, enter scenes late, exit early, cut everything that doesn’t tighten the wire.

 

Then suddenly you’re writing a novel and realizing readers actually need moments where the pressure changes. Not disappears — changes.

 

A detective notices the weather. A suspect becomes briefly funny. Somebody eats terrible pie in a roadside diner while avoiding a question.

 

Those moments aren’t inefficiencies. They’re contrast. Without dynamic range, suspense becomes monotonous.

 

What helped me most was writing novellas before attempting a full novel. A novella taught me how to sustain tension without trying to maintain maximum intensity on every page. It also taught me something unexpectedly practical:

 

Short stories reward immediate relevance. Novels reward deferred significance.

 

That shift took time for me. I had to stop treating every paragraph like it was competing for survival.

 

Oddly enough, writing long also improved my short fiction. I became less dependent on compression as a substitute for depth. I stopped mistaking omission for mystery. Some stories genuinely want expansion. 

 

Others die from it.

 

I still think in short-story terms first. Most of my ideas arrive as images, scenes, fragments of dialogue, moments of pressure. But now, when something keeps echoing instead of resolving, I pay attention to that.

 

That’s usually the sign the music wants another movement.