On Query Letters: Part 2 of 3

So. As promised, some major and eternal DON'Ts of writing query letters.

DON'T send a query letter without first Googling "How to write a query letter." In other words, WHY are you flying blindly when the Internet provides you a basic (wonderful) education on how to stand out?

DON'T send a long query. I say long, because the proper length of a query letter is up for interpretation. A rule of thumb is a one-page query, but my personal preference (and my preference comes after reading hundreds of query letters) is--the SHORTER, the BETTER. If you say it with seven words, see if you can cut it down to five. The most powerful query letters that I've read have been concise.

DON'T send a run-on sentence. This seems obvious, but you'd be surprised! If your query is a big block of text, break it up with some white space. Try to learn the art of writing feng shui--making the query letter visually look pleasing and underwhelming.

DON'T write movie-trailer tags and think you are summarizing your plot. "Jo-Jo meets an untold danger." "Her life changes in drastic ways." "Mark uncovered a deadly secret..." These... mean nothing. These are filler words, attempting to sound dramatic. But they don't. The reason these work in a movie trailer is the movie trailer is a visual medium. With a query letter, when you summarize your plot, you have only those words. Be specific.

DON'T be insulting, whether it's outright and intentional or accidental. Examples:
Outright insulting: "I hate all your client's books, but my book is gonna be a big seller, so let's make money."
Accidentally insulting: "There's no good YA books out there! My book will fix that!"

(Sentence A is an obvious no-no. DON'T come across cocky. DON'T talk about money, or bestsellers, or anything that implies you know nothing about the publishing industry or how publishing really works.

Sentence B is a little sneakier, but I see it a lot... and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. See, the agent you are querying... WORKS IN PUBLISHING. If you insult the genre he or she represents, you are basically saying the work he or she has done so far is shoddy. DON'T say anything negative about the industry in your query, because you will come across as ignorant.)

I'm not even going to write DON'T include typos, grammar errors, or poorly written sentences, because that seems a given (even though those still somehow slip in.

The truth is, for every query letter that follows the rules to a T, there's another one that breaks all the rules... and is amazing. But I'm a firm believer that you must first know the rules, then know why you're breaking them.

Part 3 tomorrow, about query letter DO's!