Dear Agent: What I Said (and Didn't Say) in My Query Letter
After He Said Cancer | Memoir Update
Every writer who goes the traditional publishing route has to write a query letter. This single page distills years of work, the soul of a book, and why it matters into a few paragraphs.
Most query letters are deleted. Mine probably will be too.
But writing it forced me to answer a question I've been circling for months: what kind of book did I actually write? Below the paywall, I share the letter I've been sending to agents and what it reveals about the little negotiation happening inside my head every time I hit send.
In my last post, I explained a bit about the tough business of book publishing, especially for a personal memoir like the one I am writing, After He Said Cancer. The options and paths to publication for a debut author have expanded enormously in the last ten years. If speed were my first priority, I could have published my book on Amazon several months ago.
My primary goal is to find a path that gives the book the widest possible distribution and best chance of bringing male breast cancer into the larger pink world of female breast cancer. This means pursuing traditional publishing and securing literary representation. Querying a literary agent is the first step toward being published by one of the five largest publishing houses, known as “The Big Five”: Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan. Four of every five general trade books sold in the U.S. come from a Big Five house. Their titles dominate bookstores and bestseller lists. A Big Five deal is no guarantee of success, but it opens doors that other paths don’t.
The odds that a literary agent will sign me are probably in the 2-3% range (or lower). Many agents see the word “memoir” and immediately delete the email. My chances of landing traditional representation would be much higher if I reframed the book as a “prescriptive memoir” that blends personal narrative with substantive nonfiction content on male and female breast cancer.
Here is the dilemma.
The current book is structured as a memoir that reads like a novel with content on male breast cancer and how the entire field of medical treatments and diagnostics in cancer is changing, which weaves in and out of my own story.
Do I rewrite the book to lean into that prescriptive framing, where I blend in the research on breast cancer in a more structured way throughout the book, and use a shorter version of the text in my story to support more of a hybrid nonfiction/memoir structure?
Or do I stay true to the structure I’ve built, which reads more like literary fiction?
My inner voice tells me to stay the course and protect the memoir as a work of creative nonfiction that feels like a novel. This is the kind of book that I have always dreamed of writing, and it is more likely to find a home with a small university press, an independent press, or a hybrid publisher. Self-publishing on Amazon is always an option, too.
That said, I should probably revise my query letter to give more weight to the investigative research in the latter half of the book on male breast cancer, breast cancer treatments, and emerging diagnostics. Ideally, the query letter should be 400 words, but I am already at 435. It’s a challenge to fit it in.
Without further ado, here is my query letter, shared below the paywall. Most authors don’t share their query letter, treating it as proprietary material. I somewhat agree with this approach, but will share it anyway for my paid subscribers. Thank you for supporting this writing journey.
