Query Letter #1

And because I am a glutton for punishment (or maybe it's that I'm a sadist), I am going to post all 6 query letters. So here it is, my first crack at it. #1. Possibly not the worst query letter ever written, but that bar is too low to limbo under. I bet I don't miss it by much though.

The tone is wrong for the book. It is far, far too long. Just this synopsis takes up the whole first page of a one page letter. Oops. Yeah. I suspect it was looking at this mess and realizing there was only so much revision could do that gave me the idea of tossing and starting over several more times.

Query letter #1


We all know secretaries run the world. What we don’t know is there exists a governmental department of secretary spies, the Strategic Secretarial Services, that grew up in World War II and has been saving the world ever since. In my novel, Spies and Secretaries, Swan Shreve is about to learn.

Swan Shreve graduated with a doctorate in American Literature and then hit a wall. Unable to find a decent job at a university because of her focus on Edith Wharton’s ghost stories, not serious enough literature, she finds a job as a secretary and now feels insecure and defeated, still sending out resumes every Tuesday.

Mrs. Hamel and the Strategic Secretarial Services have another problem. Ever since women’s liberation all the good candidates have gone into “better” careers. And while she can still wield a machine gun and crush a larynx with the best of them before going home to bake excellent cookies for her seven grandkids, she knows if they don’t get some new members soon, the SSS will die out and the country will be left with only the CIA to protect them.

However Swan is more inclined to believe Mrs. Hamel is senile than a master spy and refuses to join. When another secretary at her company in assassinated, Swan finds herself helping the SSS discover the mole in their midst and learning that her own self worth doesn’t need to be tied to her job title.