How I Found My Literary Agent + Top Five Query Letter Tips

Some very specific and highly-researched query letter advice from a friendly and slightly-type-A thriller author ✨☺️

Santa Monica Beach After a Storm, 2017

Los Angeles, the city where I was born and have lived for almost twenty years, is experiencing one of the worst natural disasters in its recent history.

I was born in West LA. My dad taught me how to ride a bike on the Santa Monica boardwalk. I attended friends' birthday parties in the Palisades, met my fiancé near the Santa Monica Pier, watched the sunset from the Malibu mountains, and wrote in cafés along the PCH. Nearly every Christmas, one of my closest friends invited us to her mom and stepdad’s Christmas party at the home she grew up in in the Palisades.

To see the communities and homes destroyed by the fire is heartbreaking. The smoke and potential health impacts are hard to comprehend. Yet even in all of this sadness, it gives me hope to see how neighbors and friends have uplifted each other during this time, donating, sheltering, and sharing what they have.

The book community in Los Angeles is special to me, and if you are a writer who has lost your home in the fires, please feel free to get in touch via my website. I’d be happy to critique your query letter or part of your manuscript for free, answer any questions you have, and do what I can to support.

In the meantime, this article is meant to help writers out there who are looking for an agent. Once you start digging, the querying information can be overwhelming, but I’ve tried to simplify this into my top five tips. After querying the third novel I wrote, I was able to find my incredible agent, Alexandra Machinist at CAA, and it was she who connected me with my editor, Hilary Teeman at Ballantine, Penguin Random House. Finding an agent whom I could trust and with whom I could start to build a longstanding professional relationship was a goal that I had early on, and now that we have worked together for almost four years, I can say that she has had a major impact on both my writing and my career.

This is from 2021, when I was editing Society of Lies with my agent. She had some major changes for me to tackle, and I was rereading it one chapter at a time, considering where and how to make the changes.

Are you a writer looking for an agent? Do you want to get your novel traditionally published?

Whether you are at the beginning of the process, thinking, “What is querying?” or you’ve sent hundreds of queries already and have yet to find an agent, you are in the right place.

Here are my top five tips for finding an agent:

1. Read the Acknowledgments Section

   Specifically of authors who write in your genre and whose work you love. Here, you will find that their agent is often one of the first people thanked, and you can assemble a Google Sheets spreadsheet like the one I used below. I also used the website Manuscriptwishlist.com and Publisher’s Marketplace (It’s a pricey $25/mo, I believe, for a subscription, but you can just do this for a month while you’re putting together your spreadsheet)

2. Query in Batches of Five or Ten

   Once you have your manuscript polished as much as humanly possible, including many months of rewriting, reverse outlining, writing a beat sheet, rereading passes (dialogue, character 1, character 2, mystery threads, a cutting pass etc.), and workshopping with critique partners and beta readers…then you’re ready to start querying.

   At this stage, I sent my query letter out in batches of five to test the waters. If an agent likes your query letter, which is an email following very specific guidelines listed on their website or in their bio, then they will respond and request the full manuscript. When I was querying my debut novel, Society of Lies, I received about 25 full manuscript requests out of about 50 total queries, but I had written two novels before, one of which I queried to receive all rejections…

   The reason to query in batches, is if you sent out fifteen, and they are all to agents of varying experience and agencies, and have no response, it doesn’t mean that you should give up or that your writing is not good enough (things I thought at the time). It could mean that your query letter needs work or your first pages that you *copied and pasted* into the body of your email in your query letter need some attention.

3. Research Agents and Read the Novels They Represent

   You’ll want to make sure that your taste aligns with theirs, so choose to query agents whose work you’ve read and loved.

   Carefully follow the instructions listed on the agency website. I know it’s annoying, but this step is really important because they will list very specific instructions that vary per agent in their bio along with the email address to send the email. Email subject line - QUERY: JANE DOE, SOCIETY OF LIES

4. Specific Query Letter Tips

   I started with my word count, genre, and comps. It’s important that your word count is within the typical range for your genre. For mystery/thriller I believe 70,000-95,000 words is about right.

   Next, you have the pitch, which I like to think of as what you would read on the back cover of a book. It doesn’t need to tell every detail of your book, it just has to have tension or a central conflict, and it has to get someone to want to read your book. To write mine, I read many examples from my favorite novels in the genre, and even books that the agent I was querying represented, to get the tone and structure right.

   Finally, end with a short bio.

Here is my query letter below:

Dear Alexandra Machinist,

I am seeking your representation for Society of Lies, an upmarket thriller in the vein of The Secret History and Big Little Lies. The manuscript is complete at 90,000 words.

I enjoyed *YOUR CLIENT'S* writing in a SPECIFIC NOVEL. I loved the combination of plot twists along with the character-driven storyline. In your bio, you mentioned enjoying BOOK TITLE OR SPECIFIC REFERENCE FROM BIO, and I feel you would be a great fit for my manuscript because, like THAT BOOK, Society of Lies has a complicated protagonist, past/present narrative structure, and feminist themes.

Maya Banks has it all—a successful career, loving husband, and five-year-old daughter. When she returns to Princeton for her younger sister’s graduation, she expects a weekend spent reminiscing about her college days.

But when she learns her sister has drowned in the lake near campus, Maya’s world is shaken. She soon discovers that her sister was involved in a secret society and suspects it may have had something to do with her death.

As Maya searches for answers, a secret in her past tests the strength of her relationships. She must confront her past in order to find out the truth…and the truth may be darker than she thinks.

Society of Lies explores privilege, complicated relationships, and the cost of remaining silent.

After growing up in the Bay Area, I received a BA in English from Princeton and an MFA in film from USC School of Cinematic Arts with a focus on screenwriting. I’ve worked the past eight years in post-production and, when not working, I enjoy spending time with family, traveling, and reading. As a Black and Chinese daughter of an immigrant, I like to explore the nuances of multiracial identity in my writing.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

Lauren Ling Brown

*this letter has been slightly modified to reflect changes to the story

5. Don’t Give Up!

   Querying can be a long, multi-year process, as it was for me over the two books I queried. Don’t give up. There are also pitch contests on Twitter and Query Fest, which is a part of Thriller Fest in NYC where you can pitch an agent live. Once you get an offer of representation from an agent, then the common practice is to email the other agents who are currently reading your full manuscript (you can also include your top five or ten even if they haven’t given you a full request), and tell them that you have received an offer of representation and that you will be making a decision in two weeks, by *date*, that will allow them to either finish reading your MS or request to read your full MS if they’re interested in the premise and opening pages :)

   Feel free to comment any additional questions below. Hope some of these tips help!

Additional Resources for a Deep Dive:

Favorite Craft Books:

On Writing - Stephen King

Modern Library Writer’s Workshop - Stephen Koch

Save the Cat Writes a Novel - Jessica Brody

Online Resources:

https://www.manuscriptwishlist.com

https://queryshark.blogspot.com/

Substack Resources:

Kathleen Schmidt - https://substack.com/@kathleenschmidt?r=suf16&utm_campaign=profile&utm_medium=profile-page

Andrea Bartz - https://substack.com/@andibartz?r=suf16&utm_campaign=profile&utm_medium=profile-page

Query letter archive:

https://andibartz.substack.com/p/how-to-pitch-your-book

Youtube Resources:

Shaelin Writes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8-jsG6NG3oKuxpODp7Ucu4RVjL6X2jOP&si=-feUvvDDswbNJcky

Alyssa Matesic (Also a great freelance editor for a MS critique!) https://www.youtube.com/c/AlyssaMatesic

Nonfiction Query Letter:

Book Ends:

The notecards on the wall for plotting Society of Lies and adding Naomi’s timeline after Maya’s past/present timeline was already in place.