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Template · By Draftly · Updated 2026-08-20

How to write a query letter to a literary agent

An agent decides on a query in the time it takes to read four paragraphs, and most of the decision happens in the first two. The eight lines below are the whole letter. Each one is filled in for a novel you already know, so you can see the shape before you write your own.

A painted still life: a single sheet carrying a few short lines of ink, beside a thick stack of pages covered edge to edge in writing, with an inkwell, a quill and a brass letter opener on the desk.

What goes in a query letter

A query runs about three hundred words, which sounds generous until you try to fit a novel inside it. Four of the eight lines below carry the book: the title line, the hook, the pitch and the comps. The other four are manners, and manners are cheap to get right.

Every field is filled in for The Picture of Dorian Gray — Oscar Wilde, 1891. A query letter example filled in as though the 1891 book edition were going out to agents this week, written by someone with no novel published yet. That is the position most query letters are written from.

  1. THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

The letter, top to bottom

8 fields

  1. Dear Ms. Okonkwo,

  2. You asked for gothic novels with a narrator who cannot be trusted. This is one, set in London.

  3. THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY is literary horror, complete at 78,000 words.

  4. A young man's portrait agrees to do his ageing for him.

  5. Dorian Gray is twenty, rich, and being painted by a man who loves him. He wishes aloud that the canvas would take the years instead, and the wish holds. Eighteen years of appetite leave his face alone and the picture unrecognisable, locked in a room at the top of the house. Now the painter wants it back for a show in Paris.

  6. Readers of Tananarive Due's The Reformatory and Julia Armfield's Our Wives Under the Sea will know the register.

  7. This is my first novel. I review theatre for a weekly paper, and two of my stories have appeared in anthologies.

  8. The first ten pages are pasted below, as your guidelines ask. Thank you for reading.

The rest of the letter, and the parts the guides skip

Six groups. The last two are the ones the guides usually leave out: what the letter becomes when the book is nonfiction, and what changes when you have already published it yourself.

The pitch, line by line

5 fields
Two paragraphs at most, and one is often enough.

  1. Dorian, not the painter and not Lord Henry, because Dorian is the one who makes the wish.

  2. To keep the face he has at twenty.

  3. Every year lands on the painting instead, and the painting is evidence.

  4. Basil Hallward, who painted it and wants it for an exhibition.

  5. At the locked room. The ending goes in the synopsis, if one is asked for.

The email around the letter

5 fields

  1. Query: THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (literary horror, 78,000 words)

  2. Dear Agent, and only when the agency lists no individual.

  3. 250 to 350 words, before any sample pages.

  4. None unless the guidelines name a file. Paste the pages into the body.

  5. Name, city, and one link if the link is a writing credit.

The comps line

5 fields
Two titles. A third reads as hedging.

  1. Two, and one of them can be a film.

  2. Published in the last three to five years, so an agent can look up how it sold.

  3. A book that sold in the millions. It tells an agent nothing about where yours would sit.

  4. One film and one novel works, when the film is recent and the register matches.

  5. After the pitch and before the bio, in a single sentence.

The bio when you have no credits

5 fields

  1. Say so in four words and move on.

  2. Short fiction in a named magazine or anthology. Two is plenty.

  3. Fifteen years as a nurse, for a novel set on a ward.

  4. Workshops attended, degrees in unrelated fields, and the manuscripts in the drawer.

  5. One sentence of thanks, with no promises about how much they will love it.

What changes for nonfiction and memoir

5 fields
The same letter with a different centre of gravity.

  1. The argument and who needs it, in place of the story.

  2. A projected word count, because the book is not written yet.

  3. A short paragraph on the readers you already reach, with figures rather than adjectives.

  4. A proposal with one or two sample chapters, not a finished manuscript.

  5. Finished manuscript like a novel, pitched on the story like a novel, and the platform paragraph stays.

What changes if you have already self-published

5 fields
The rule is disclosure. Where you disclose it is the choice.

  1. Yes, in the bio, in one line.

  2. Include them when they are strong. Silence beats a number that argues against you.

  3. Say what you still own, and whether the edition is on sale today.

  4. Retitling a book that sold little is ordinary. Name the old title once, so an agent who finds it later is not surprised.

  5. Some say in their guidelines that they do not read previously published work. That page is worth reading before the letter is written.

Query letter template (PDF)Query letter template (Word)

Blank, laid out in the order above, and yours without an account or an email address.

What the letter is deciding

A query asks one question. Is there a book here worth two hours of an agent's evening? Every line in the letter either helps answer that or gets in the way of it.

Which is why the pitch stops at the locked room. An agent who wants to know what happens next asks for the pages, and that request is the only outcome the letter is built for. What comes after it, the manuscript going out in standard format, has conventions of its own and a page of its own here.

Three hundred words hold one character and one problem with room to spare.

What gets a query rejected

The first group is written down in submission guidelines, so those are instructions rather than opinions. The last group is taste, which is why two agents will tell you opposite things and both will be telling the truth.

Named in the guidelines

  • An attachment where the page asked for pasted text
  • Two agents at the same agency, queried the same week
  • No word count anywhere in the letter
  • A genre the agency does not take on
  • A query sent while submissions are closed

Read as carelessness

  • The agent's name spelled the way it sounds
  • A mail merge that kept the previous agent's name
  • The wrong agency named in the first line
  • A word count that changes between the subject line and the pitch
  • Sample pages in a font the guidelines rule out

Read as inexperience

  • A household-name author, with you as the next one
  • A book for readers of any age and background
  • An opening that asks the agent a question
  • Book one of a planned seven
  • Praise from your writing group, quoted

A matter of taste

  • Naming the theme out loud
  • An epigraph above the letter
  • A pitch written in the narrator's voice
  • Your age, at either end of it
  • Thank you for your time and consideration, as the closing

Questions & Answers

What is a query letter?
A one-page email to a literary agent asking whether they want to read your novel. Writing a query letter to a literary agent is the first step of submitting a novel, and for most agencies it is the only one you control. It names the book, its genre and its length, pitches the story in two paragraphs, says who you are, and stops. The agent uses it to decide whether to request the manuscript.
How long should a query letter be?
250 to 350 words, before any sample pages the agency asks you to paste below. Under 200 words and the pitch is usually missing a stake. Over 400 and the pitch has turned into a synopsis.
What is the standard query letter format?
A business email with no letterhead. Greeting, one line on why this agent, one line of title, genre and word count, two paragraphs of pitch, one sentence of comparable titles, two lines of bio, then a close. The template above is that order with the blanks left in.
Do you send a synopsis with a query letter?
Only when the guidelines ask for one. The synopsis is a separate document, it runs one to two pages, and unlike the query it gives away the ending. Send what the agency lists and nothing else.
Do query letters matter if you self-publish?
You will not send one to an agent, but the same three hundred words go to book bloggers, reviewers and the promotion sites that ask what the book is about. The pitch is the part that gets reused for years.
How many agents can you query at once?
As many as you like at different agencies, unless one asks for an exclusive read. One agent per agency at a time is what agency submission pages ask for, and a pass from one is often a pass from the building.

Um só lugar para o livro todo.

Abre um capítulo e tudo o que ele precisa já está ao lado: o elenco, os lugares, as regras que inventaste, a nota que deixaste a ti mesmo em novembro. Nada para procurar, nada para sincronizar à mão — e sem essa fricção, os dias em que escreves começam a somar.