Why Query Letters Exist
An Introduction to Polite Bourgeois Non-Readership
The publishing world runs on the pitch, the platform, and the prose in that order, the last of these distantly third. It’s not anybody’s fault; literary agents and publishing houses are inundated with submissions, most of which are not viable, and people inside are forced by business circumstances to work on so many lackluster but commercially potent books that their love of reading collapses. Idealists go into publishing; the industry brutalizes them for the crime of having once had beliefs.
The slush, unfortunately, is real. There are millions of helplessly bad writers who don’t know they’re bad, and the emotional labor involved in convincing them to give up is beyond the affordances of already exhausted editorial staff. Slush-pile rescues make excellent PR, so literary agencies will never publicly admit that submissions are effectively closed, but the industry is so full of noise and bluster that getting a serious read, or even a fair one, usually requires calling in a personal favor.
In theory, natural language models (“AI”) could be deployed to solve the slush problem. Alas, AI is also making things worse—the slush is more superficially articulate, and there’s twice as much of it. I’ve written enough about AI in publishing elsewhere (1/9/23, 3/5/25, 5/12/25) that I won’t say more on the topic here. I guarantee you that the industry will use machine learning to triage slush; they will also refuse to admit it until they can no longer pretend.
For the time being, the industry runs on the query letter, a device of etiquette by which it becomes socially acceptable (while still humiliating) for a drowning author to beg for help. It is the one-page document one uses to say, “Please read my book.” Sort-of. It also says the opposite, and we’ll get back to that. Do cold queries work? Often enough that the industry can tout a dozen slush-pile rescues per year. Not more. Favors and connections decide most of whether work gets read at all, let alone read fairly and with enough time taken to assess whether it achieves what the author is trying to do. Publishing and literature are worse for this, and everyone knows it, but very few people are allowed to say it.
Why, though? Why is a foundationally stupid institution like the query letter ubiquitous? Socialization. It is there to tame authors. The lesson: learn how to be inoffensive in a world where very few people read—and, also, one in which even the slightest hint of wanting to be read by someone ensures it will never happen, because that is how most humans work. The purpose of the query letter is for aspiring authors to learn which forms of begging are tacitly accepted as noisy humiliations that both sides of the writing world just have to live with, and which ones are not.
The lesson here, for people who want to make it in bourgeois publishing, is a good one. Never ask, “Have you read my book yet?” First of all, the answer is almost always no, and it’s impolite to put people on the spot. Second, and worse, this is uncomfortably close to, “Did you like it?” And that’s a worthless question. If you’re purely a commercial novelist, your status as an author is already known—it’s your fucking numbers. On the other hand, if you have the talent and drive and self-destructiveness to become an artistic novelist, you will quickly reach a point where the percentage of people who can understand what you are doing well enough to evaluate your execution is… not high, not even in the upper echelons of traditional publishing. Opinions matter, because they determine where you are and are not allowed to go, but most of them don’t mean anything.
The query letter is a formalized, polite way to show your understanding that, in the context of your career, almost none of the people making decisions that affect you will read your work. An agent might skim your manuscript for fifteen minutes to make sure there’s nothing cancelable. Marketing professionals will decide whether it gets a four-, five-, six-, or seven-figure advance, but they don’t have the time for deep reading either. It isn’t malicious; they just have a million other things to do. Publishing’s reading algorithm is to combine a couple dozen vague impressions into a picture, and call that the assessment. Starting from a literary agent’s unpaid intern, and culminating in the executive suite of the publishing house, at least ten people have to say yes to make a serious deal happen. The idea is that, if each of them reads at ten-percent comprehension, you get a whole hundred. I probably don’t have to tell you my opinion of this, but it’s what the writing world is stuck with if it’s not ready to abandon traditional publishing. The book will eventually be read, but not by any of the kingmakers. Direct work with text is for the copyeditors who bring it to production.
When you write a query letter, the direct request is that they read your work, but the social purpose of the letter is the opposite—to give someone permission never to read you. This seems weird at first. Why would anyone need that? No one owes readership to anyone. This otherwise unnecessary permission exists only in the context of a meritocratic promise. Traditional publishing desperately wants the public to believe it still discovers and develops new talent, because 1950s nostalgia is potent. A query letter’s role is to say:
You are hereby offered full credit for having read me, even if you decide not to do so, in which case I will attribute it solely to this letter’s failure and therefore consider it a mark against my skill, not your industriousness or commitment to meritocracy. I understand that my career will be determined by opinions held by people who have never properly read my work, who have not read for pleasure in the past fifteen years, and, in some cases, do not read at all. I accept that. If you are still reading, here are four paragraphs that do not matter because they pertain to a story that, if accepted for publication, will be edited beyond recognition by your marketing department.
The query letter’s existence says all that for you—the medium really is the message. And then, dear aspiring author, you may tell your dream literary agent about Marisa’s Flossing, your 450,000-word literary novel about Millennial dental hygiene.
If you want a career in traditional publishing, you should probably get good at writing query letters. You can invest in the 100,000 words that will be read by readers and copyeditors, or you can invest in the 300 words that will be read by important people. Which is career-optimal? You already know. You’ve always known, but if you’ve read this far, you’re probably one of the few who fights against the fact. And welcome. Continue to do the right thing. Continue to value the words on the page, which, because they do not matter, matter the most.