Selling the Book: The Attention-Getting Query Letter

Dear Editors:

As with the hundreds of other emails you will get today, requesting the very same, I have a novel, the working title of which is Dearly Departed, which, unlike the hundreds of other requests your wearied eyes will consider today, is actually pretty good. I won't bore you with even a line or two of details, since there are many who can write jacket copy who can't write an affecting line much less an affecting novel, so, please, to save us both time and needless torpor, read the rest of this, my query ... and then, contrary to habit and probability, write me back and ask that I send you, per the custom, fifty pages, for you to read and consider.

Having then read and considered them, ask for more. At which point you will come to the reasonable conclusion that they are quite a lot better than almost anything you see on a daily basis: that the writing is excellent, the narrative drive compelling, that, along with real-life gore, and sex, and interestingly fucked up characters getting under each other's skin in ways both nuanced and not so, there is even a well-hung midget, albeit deep into the book, one who, granted, we never actually see, but nonetheless, a well-hung midget is a well-hung midget—one I wouldn't be averse to mingling in the action a little more if it suits you.

Which is to say, on certain matters, I'm flexible.

That said, on the actual point of whether or not you decide to read and publish my book, I am not so flexible. On that point I am actually quite insistent. Which is to say: you will like and publish my pages, my novel, please, or so help me God I'll blow my fucking brains out.

Let me explain ...

But before I do, before you note my address and panic—OMG! He's from Colorado! A nutjob threatening us from the state currently at the top of the A-list for nutjobs!!! WTF!!!!—let me assure you that, should you decide NOT to publish my novel, I will NOT, I promise, shoot or otherwise harm, in any way, anyone else, this despite what would surely be considerable disappointment on my part.

Furthermore, I have a wife and two young children, and am certainly not going to blow my brains out in the house where I currently reside ...

Frankly I don't even own a firearm (for reasons that should be obvious by now), which is not to say I couldn't get one pretty easily (need I say more on THAT subject?), or that, on the contrary, I'm looking forward to my children one day getting older and looking at me, ensconsed in my study, ignoring them—"radically wasting time," as the great Annie Lamott once called it—and coming to the stark, hateful conclusion that this is why we no longer have any money, why we are having to, conceivably, sell our house and move to a small apartment far away from the fine neighborhood and school district that is currently ours, why there are no vacations to Hawaii and New York City anymore, why they can no longer partake in the kind of expensive activities that their older brothers took for granted—because Daddy is a writer who had to write a book, one that when he finally finished it he couldn't fucking sell!

Regardless of your circumstances, dear editor, you can surely understand how a responsible parent (such as the term is generally understood in our better communities) wouldn't exactly look forward to such an eventuality. Enough that he might consider, on occasion—now, for instance—doing something that many would consider a bit extreme. Especially when one considers that even if you publish my book, and it enjoys modest success (as the term is generally understood with regard to first-time literary novels), that modest success will only provide me, the writer, with enough money to pay, with any luck, next month's bills, this depending on whether someone had to go to the hospital, or the dentist, whether ice fees for hockey were due the previous month ...

And—AND—surely, you being the sensitive, at times neurotic literary type you almost certainly must be—working for free, yes? reading scores of mediocre to poor manuscripts, imagining yourself on your better days, nonetheless, as a kind of Soulmate to the Monks, in the Dark Ages, keeping literature alive!—you despair over the staggering amount of drivel, the wincingly, cringingly tepid, self-indulgent, uninspired (if occasionally "well-crafted") shit, much of it from cash-flush MFA programs, getting slung around to scores of agents and publishers like yourself, many of whom are dependent now more than ever on reading fees and handouts from those few wealthy souls who haven't already handed out all they are going to hand out to cure cancer, to feed the starving, support their candidates, their causes, not to mention the local orchestra and theater, who have, magnanimously, left a little back to support LIT-RAH-CHOOR. You have to admit you are thankful that most of them aren't readers, that they simply like the idea of supporting LIT-RAH-CHOOR, kind of like you like the idea of being an agent for, an editor of, LIT-RAH-CHOOR—

Except that on some days, my fucking God ...

Still, and despite your own unsettling moments of despair, you have to admit it would bother you if you were to find out not long after you insouciantly deleted my email query that I did in fact blow my fucking brains out. Even if I didn't do it in my home, or under a tree outside your office (think about that! you who thinks woodpeckers and pigeons are annoying), even if I went out into the woods, or way up in the mountains, and didn't make a mess that someone like Amy Adams in that movie "Sunshine Cleaners" would have to clean up (a profession, btw, should you be looking for a new one, where one can make serious bank).

It would bother you the worse for the fact that, once I was dead, someone, probably several, would actually be asking for the manuscript, looking at it, reading it, considering it, the new platforms post-suicide, the money, and wondering why no one—YOU—ever bothered to ask for it, a mere fifty pages, from a suicidal author!

Soon, all over Twitter and Facebook ... Tumbler, all those sites that have contributed to our fragmenting attention and made your particular failing, antediluvian industry an even poorer, more depressing economic bet, there would be the easy, predictable comparisons to John Kennedy Toole, who, likewise, killed himself after not being able to publish his novel ... a novel that later went on, after his mother (who doesn't come off well in the book; one must admit the pathos is heartbreaking) showed the manuscript to the estimable Walker Percy, at LSU, to win the Pulitzer Prize.

And keep in mind that the late John Kennedy Toole never had children to be ashamed of his failure, or a nice house in a desirable neighborhood in the best town in the country to raise a family and buy locally produced art, to lose—no, he was merely a misfit radically wasting his time with a Big Chief tablet in his mother's basement, trying to publish when, let's be honest, it was quite a lot easier to get published.

Keep in mind: You don't want to be that person. You want to be the person who says, Don't be an asshole! Don't run off to the mountains and kill yourself! Send me your pages to me, and I'll read them! I'll publish you! I mean, why not? Who the fuck will notice, right? We'll publish you and afterwards leave you to continue on in your Sisyphean way, to radically waste time, to make sure that your children look to your example one day and think: Fuck that, I'm going to medical school.

Only then will the success of your insensible enterprise become apparent.

Yes, you want to be the person who says all that, if not much less. Who, after publishing my novel, can go on television and maybe write a book yourself one day, telling how you saved another writer's life. Maybe put a well-hung midget in there, one with fangs. A well-hung, walking dead midget with fangs who can travel through time and has a dog who can quote Shakespeare and philosophize on a level that people who aren't terribly philosophical might think is brilliant.

You could be the person who might one day, from a podium somewhere, thank me.

Looking forward, expectantly, to your reply.

All the best,


The Author