How to Write the Perfect Query Letter Book Description
Ask any aspiring writer who has tried to get traditionally published what their least favorite part of the process is and they’ll no doubt mention query letter writing.
But it’s not the letter itself that has most writers tearing out their hair. It’s the process of trying to take an intricate and highly tuned story that is tens-of-thousands of words long and boil it down to a simple three hundred word description. And not just any description, but one that’s engaging, interesting, and unique enough to get an agent’s attention.
If you’re struggling with how to write a query letter book description, then you’ve come to the right place. In this post, I’ll show you how to boil your story down to its most basic elements to create a succinct story description that highlights all the necessary parts of your story while showcasing what makes it worth reading.
What Is a Query Letter?
Before we dive into how to write a book description for a query letter, let’s take a quick moment to define what a query letter is.
A query letter in the literary world is a one page document used to entice agents, editors, or publishers into reading and requesting your fiction. Most often, aspiring writers send query letters to literary agents in hopes of getting them to represent their work and help them sell it to a publishing house.
If you aren’t familiar with what a query letter looks like, it is worth taking some time to familiarize yourself with the basic concept. This is a formal letter that has a lot of well defined rules within the industry.
For those that aren’t familiar with what a query letter looks like, here are some real-life examples from now-published authors.
What Does a Query Letter Include?
In no particular order, a query letter should include all of the following elements:
- Metadata – Metadata (as the cool kids call it), or “housekeeping info,” is all the technical information about your book: the title, genre, age group, and word count. This doesn’t need to be any longer than a single sentence.
- Story Comps – Story comps are books that are similar to yours, usually ones that have come out recently and have sold decently well (but not too well). The necessity of including comps is debatable, but most agents agree that these help them get a picture of the potential marketability of a book. This info can often be included in a single sentence following your metadata.
- Author Bio – The author bio is a short paragraph about you that highlights any publishing or literary accomplishments and gives a little about your background and how it relates to your story. Unless you have a ton of writing accomplishments, your bio should be between one and three sentences.
- Personalization – Another piece of the query letter that is sometimes considered optional is a bit of personalization to let the agent know that you have done your research and that what they’re looking for is on par with the story you’ve written. If you have some stronger connection to the agent (you’ve met at a conference, etc), then a short personalized paragraph explaining this connection is a must.
- Book Description – The most important and largest piece of your query letter is your book description. Ninety-nine percent of the time, it is the info in these paragraphs alone that convinces the agent to request more pages.
In this post, I will be focusing exclusively on this last and most important element.
How to Write a Book Description for Your Query Letter
Your query letter should be no longer than a single spaced typed page. That gives you around 450 total words to get all of the information above across to the recipient of your query letter. Of that, you’ll want to dedicate around 300 words to telling the reader what happens in your story.
Sounds easy doesn’t it? Well, don’t forget, you need to make sure your story sounds different and more interesting than the other ten thousand query letters that agent has received this month and make sure you explain all the important details without getting overly detailed. Oh, and you have to leave them wanting more, which means you can’t give away your awesome twist ending.
Not sure where to start? You aren’t alone.
Taking a massive story with dozens of characters and multiple subplots and boiling it down to two or three paragraphs is not a simple task. But I have a trick to help you get started.
Define the 7 Must-Have Elements of Your Story
Before you even begin trying to summarize your story into a book description, I want you to take a few minutes to define the seven must-have elements that make up your storyline.
These seven things exist in every great story. Identifying what they are in your particular book is key to creating the framework that you will write your story blurb around.
1. Hook
The first thing you’ll need to define is also one of the hardest pieces to throw together, and that’s your story hook.
Now, many people use “hook” and “book description” interchangeably. But when I’m talking about your hook, I am speaking only about the most basic elements that make your story unique. Basically, if you had one sentence to explain your book to an agent, what would you say to pique their interest?
In this sense, I am using the word hook to mean something similar to a tagline or elevator pitch. Another way to think about it is to ask, what is the essence of your story?
Here are some popular movie hooks courtesy of IMBd to give you an idea of what I mean:
- Back to the Future: A young man is accidentally sent 30 years into the past in a time-traveling DeLorean invented by his friend, Dr. Emmett Brown, and must make sure his high-school-age parents unite in order to save his own existence.
- Jurassic Park: During a preview tour, a theme park suffers a major power breakdown that allows its cloned dinosaur exhibits to run amok.
- Pirates of the Caribbean: Blacksmith Will Turner teams up with eccentric pirate “Captain” Jack Sparrow to save his love, the governor’s daughter, from Jack’s former pirate allies, who are now undead.
As you can see, none of these give a ton of detail. You don’t get a clear picture of the characters or their internal world. But what each of them does do is introduce one or two very unique plot points and gives us an idea of what’s at stake.
Take some time to jot down a quick one-sentence hook for your story. You may end up using this verbatim in your query letter or you may not. Either way, this is a great exercise to really help you flesh out what it is about your story that sets it apart from similar tales.
2. Protagonist
The next element should be the easiest to come up with: your story’s protagonist. Who is the main hero in your book?
If you have a book with multiple point of view characters and they all act as protagonists, that is fine. If you have three or less, you will name them all in your book description, so write them all down. If you have more than that, pick the most important two characters and write them down.
3. Vital Secondary Character
Now consider who your most vital secondary character is. This is typically a love interest, best friend, or sidekick. It is NOT the villain (we’ll get there in a bit).
Pick only one or two secondary characters (only those who play a vital role in changing the direction of the plot) to feature in your book blurb.
If you have a multi-POV story with more than two heroes, then you don’t have room to name any secondary characters, so skip this part.
4. The Initial Goal and the End Goal
Consider your protagonist as they are at the beginning of the book. What do they want out of life?
Now consider them near the end of the book. What do they want, now?
Write each goal down and then come up with a sentence explaining what happened that caused their desire to evolve from that first goal to the goal at the end of the book.
If you are struggling to figure this out, or if the goal didn’t evolve, there might be a problem within the plot of your book that needs to be addressed before it is ready to query.
Another way to think about this concept is by examining external goals and internal goals and how the two are connected. If you are struggling to identify your hero’s goals throughout the book, try this character building exercise.
Let’s look at an example of how goals evolve throughout books.
In The Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen starts the book with the simple goal of wanting to take care of her family. By the climax, her goal is to not let the power of the capitol control or define her. This change was driven by the fact that she was forced from her home and into the spotlight of the capitol where it became clear how much of her life is, and had always been, dictated by their power.
In Iron Man, Tony Stark starts off wanting to build a weapons empire that will make him even richer and more famous than he already is. By the climax, his goal is to use his brilliance to save the world from the same dangerous weapons he created. What happened in between is that he was captured and imprisoned by someone who stole his tech and turned it against him.
Notice how in each example the initial goal and the end goal are related. Often, the first goal is a more selfish, less important iteration of the final goal. Understanding how the two are related in your story will provide you with the roadmap for writing your book description.
If you have a multi-POV book, make sure you flesh out and define the goals of each main protagonist.
5. Inciting Incident
The inciting incident is the event that takes your protagonist from the life they are living when the book starts and forces them on the journey that eventually leads them to the climax.
Will Turner’s inciting incident in Pirates of the Caribbean is the abduction of Elizabeth and his choice to enlist Jack Sparrow to help him save her.
Understanding what event takes your character from normal to adventure is key because it will help you separate the character that begins the book from the person they become after their journey redefines them. When you introduce your protagonist in the book description, you want to introduce them in the light of who they are pre-inciting-incident. That way, your reader gets a front seat to how the actions of your story change the hero.
6. Obstacle
The obstacle of your story is the thing that gets in the way of them achieving their end goal. Often, the obstacle is a villain. Other times, the obstacle is something greater than a single person (ie. society, time, an asteroid hurtling toward Earth).
Figure out what or who plays the biggest part in keeping your hero or heros from achieving their goal and write it down.
7. Stakes
This is the most important aspect of your story to capture in your book blurb. And yet, it is the one I most often see people fail to incorporate.
The stakes are the last thing you leave the reader with at the end of your book description. This is the piece that entices the agent to say, “wow, I need to know what happens!” And that’s when they reach out for more pages.
Before you can understand your stakes, you need to identify the final climax of your story. This is easy enough in sci-fi, fantasy, and horror, where the climax often involves a huge battle or the final showdown between hero and villain. For other genres, like literary and romance, identifying the climax can be a little more difficult.
If you’re having trouble finding your final climactic scene, consider the last scene in which your hero has a chance to make a choice that will influence whether they achieve their goal or not. These different potential endings are what define your stakes.
Let’s look at some examples.
For Will Turner, his final battle is with the undead pirates. If he’s triumphant, he’ll save Elizabeth’s life but may risk his reputation in the process. If he fails, he’ll die.
For Katniss Everdeen, she’s battling for her life as the Hunger Games comes to an end. She can kill Peta and save her own life but doing so will make her just another tool of the capitol. Or she can kill herself and keep her dignity.
Consider what your hero must do to achieve their goal and the consequences of these actions. Then, consider what would happen if they fail to achieve their goal and the consequences associated with those actions. These consequences, or stakes, are what you want to leave your reader considering at the end of your book description.
For multi-POV books, the final conflict driving the stakes should be the same for all the protagonists but the stakes themselves may differ. For instance, Jack Sparrow is also fighting against the undead but what he stands to gain is control of his ship and what he stands to lose is his life via the gallows (assuming he lives that long).
Create a Book Description by Connecting These Must-Have Elements
Once you have your must-have elements defined, you are ready to start building the framework of your book description for your query letter.
How, exactly you organize and connect all these dots really depends on your story and can be influenced heavily by genre. But, in general, your query letter book description will look something like this:
Introduce the protagonist and describe their life at the beginning of the book. Define their initial goal. Describe the inciting incident. Then describe the events that lead to the transformation of the initial goal into the end goal. Define the obstacle keeping the protagonist from their end goal and the stakes they face as they battle to overcome it.
*Introduce your vital secondary character(s) at whatever point they begin to affect the plot.
**Some highly unique stories and those with complex worlds may benefit from placing the hook upfront. Most of the time, however, the aspects of the hook are sprinkled in throughout.
Examples of Book Descriptions from Successful Queries
HERE AND NOW AND THEN by Mike Chen (courtesy of Eric Smith)
Kin Stewart thought parenting a teen couldn’t get any harder, but then he got separated from his daughter — by a century. (hook)
Before that, he was a normal family man, working and parenting teenage Miranda (description of protagonist and intro of vital secondary character) — a far cry from his old job as a time-traveling secret agent from 2142. Stranded in suburbia since the 1990s because of a botched mission, he’d spent the last 17 years thinking about soccer practices and family vacations instead of temporal fugitives (initial goal).
But when his rescue team suddenly arrives (inciting incident), Kin is forced to abandon his family and return to 2142, where everyone — including his fiancee, who’s unaware of time travel — thinks he’s only been gone weeks, not years. Ordered to cut all contact with the past, Kin defies his superiors and attempts to raise his daughter from the future. Until one day he discovers that Miranda’s being erased from history…and it might be his fault. (evolution of initial goal to end goal)
With time running out, Miranda’s very existence depends upon Kin taking a final trip across time, no matter the cost (obstacle). Break time-travel rules, tell his fiancee about Miranda and his secret family, even put his own life on the line; those are risks Kin will take because there’s only one thing more important than the past and the future: doing right by his daughter (stakes).
THE LAICOS PROJECT by Erin Bowman (courtesy of Publishing Crawl)
Gray Weathersby (protagonist) is counting down the days until his eighteenth birthday with dread (initial goal), for in the primitive and isolated town of Claysoot, a boy’s eighteenth is marked not by celebration, but by his disappearance. When his older brother meets this mysterious fate, vanishing in the phenomenon the villagers have come to call the Heist, Gray begins to question everything about the place he’s called home. It all feels wrong: The Wall that no one can cross without dying, the Council leaders and their secrets, the nature of the Heist itself (lots of hook elements incorporated here).
Desperate for answers, Gray climbs the Wall (inciting incident). But Emma follows him. Emma, who Gray has admired since the day he first stole a wooden toy from her hands as a child (vital secondary character). The two are surprised to find a modern city beyond their Wall, not to mention the Franconian Order—a mysterious group of black-suited soldiers that hold the two hostage and then call for Gray’s execution (obstacle). Running for his life, Gray takes to the forests. These woods are rumored to hold hostile Rebels amongst their trees, violent civilians banding together in opposition of the Order (end goal). But the Rebels also have answers. Answers Gray has long searched for, and answers he may soon wish he never unearthed (stakes).
SIMPLY FROM SCRATCH by Alicia Bessette (courtesy of Writer’s Digest)
Her husband died more than a year ago, yet 34-year-old medical illustrator Rosellen Roy still feels raw and a bit undone (protagonist and initial goal). Her reticent widowhood is disrupted when she forms an unlikely friendship (inciting incident) with a spirited nine-year-old, Ingrid, who insists that celebrity chef Polly Pinch is her real mother (vital secondary characters). The pair aims to win a high-stakes Polly Pinch baking contest (end goal), donating the winnings. But when Ingrid disappears in a blizzard (obstacle), Rosellen’s fear of love lost is reawakened (stakes).
THE HUSBAND TRAP by Tracy Anne Warren (courtesy of Charlotte Dillon)
Violet Brantford is marrying the man of her dreams–only he doesn’t know it. (hook)
Shy, scholarly Violet Brantford (protagonist 1) has never enjoyed the stellar social success of her beautiful twin sister, Jeannette (vital secondary character); often she’s so tongue tied in public she can barely speak. Resigned to her wallflower existence and her unrequited love for her sister’s fiancé, Adrian Winter, she expects to end up a spinster (initial goal 1). Then fate steps in to shake up her life when her twin refuses to marry her rich, handsome, powerful bridegroom only hours before the Wedding (inciting incident 1). Plagued by the knowledge that Jeannette’s defection will mean social and financial ruin for their family, and tempted beyond measure by the chance to marry the man she adores (end goal 1), Violet agrees to trade identities with her twin. Now, she must keep society, and more importantly her husband, from guessing the truth (obstacle 1). Otherwise, she risks losing everything she holds most dear (stakes 1).
Worldly and influential, Adrian Winter (protagonist 2), Sixth Duke of Raeburn, knows he must marry to secure his lineage (initial goal 2). Without considering love–a fool’s illusion, he believes–he chooses the most poised and polished of the Season’s Incomparables for his bride. Only after the engagement (inciting incident 2) is official does he begin to suspect his fiancée may be playing him false with another man. Unable to prove her infidelity though, he’s honor bound to proceed with the Wedding (end goal 2). He thinks he knows what to expect of his new bride, only she surprises him with her undeniable innocence, her sweet spirit, and her love (obstacle 2). Who is this woman he doesn’t quite recognize and how will he stop himself from losing his heart? (stakes 2)
Polish, Polish, Polish
Once you have your book description written, let it rest for a few days before revisiting it and revising.
Once you have revised it all you can, give it to someone who has never read your book and have them tell you what they believe your book is about based on the information in the description. Ask them what they know about your hero and if they would pick up your book based on this blurb.
This feedback is vital to let you know what elements you are missing to accurately represent your story and what else you might need to include to keep readers engaged.
Repeat this process with new readers until you feel confident you have written the best query letter book description possible. After all, you only get one shot with each agent you query; you don’t want to send them anything that is any less than perfection!
Looking for Query Writing Help?
If you’re in need of help perfecting your query letter, we’re here for you!
Join our facebook group to get valuable insight from other aspiring writers looking to publish traditionally. We also provide paid query help for those looking for more in-depth guidance. Reach out to us via our contact page to learn more.
Have a general question about the querying process or crafting a book description? Post it in the comments section below!
