![]() Reading a longer book is an immersive experience and you might need the suspense to keep agents turning the page. For a picture book, I would 100% give away the ending. Note: for novels and memoirs, you’ll hear that you should not give away the ending in the query letter. If you have relevant expertise, include it-for example, if you teach kids how to sail, and your book is about a sailboat, or you’re a shark researcher writing about sharks, definitely say so. I would not even try to look this up, but rather just use any relevant book that has been published in the last few years. When you’re writing to an agent and not directly to a publisher, it’s much harder to find books they’ve worked on. ![]() In addition, I included titles published by Familius to show that my book would be a good fit for them. I didn’t want to say my own book was the next “Goodnight Moon” or “Go the F*ck to Sleep,” but I knew my book was in conversation with those books, so I found a way to work them in. As you’ll see in my example below, I only used “the hook” to describe my book on its own, and the next paragraph was describing my book in relation to other published books. ![]() “The book” is your longer description of the book-if you need it-and how that book fits into the market.“The hook” is your elevator pitch-how would you describe the book in 30 seconds to intrigue someone?.You only need to submit the manuscript and there’s no need to mention an illustrator. If you’re an author/illustrator, read to the bottom for some tips just for you!įollow the basic template you’d use for any book: the hook, the book, and the cook. Keep in mind that traditional publishers find the illustrators for their books. So, here’s my take on writing a picture book query letter (with an example of my own successful letter). Of course, you should still carefully compose a solid query letter, but much of the advice you’ll find online about query letters is geared toward longer books. Back when I was an agent intern going through query letters, that’s certainly what I did. Picture books, on the other hand, are so short that agents are likely to at least skim the whole book as long as the query letter is half-decent. I have great news about picture book query letters: they can be extremely short and simple! Many authors agonize over query letters for novels and memoirs because they are key in convincing an agent to read a whole book.
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