2. the coldest email
Dear [Insert Your Name Here],
Been seeing parallels between literary fiction and sales, mainly re: the literary agent query process and prospecting. Seeking literary representation is basically cold emailing where the product I’m selling is myself and my novel. Here is a query letter that I circulated two months ago (right before starting sales):
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Dear [Agent Name],
Jindo (112,000 words) is a debut upmarket literary coming-of-age novel, inspired, in part, by my experiences as a Korean American growing up in Chicagoland as a junior national figure skater. The novel interrogates the roles of Korean parenting, inherited trauma, and figure skating as they relate to perceptions of masculinity and identity building in the early 2000s.
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Jindo Cho is a figure skater from Lincolnhood, Illinois. Normally, he keeps his athletic and high school life separate because…
Well, you know.
Dudes get jumped.
But when the school paper features a picture of Jindo, flying spread eagle through the air in black spandex, his juicy badonkadonk hanging out for everyone to see, the secret is out.
Jindo’s one hope is to make the 2006 Winter Olympics his senior year, capture gold, get into Harvard, and become the male equivalent of Michelle Kwan or Kristi Yamaguchi, but better, because when Jindo lands Leno and Letterman gigs, he’ll show off his Jean-Claude Van Damme spinning jump kicks, and everyone will be like, “Damn, he’s dope,” and fall in love with him.
Because Jindo?
He’ll be champion of the world.
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I live in Chicago where I work in SaaS sales and train mixed martial arts, having competed in Muay Thai kickboxing. I hold an MFA in creative writing from the University of Central Florida.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Best,
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After 30 email queries, the letter has produced four full manuscript requests and six rejections. Two of those rejections are passes that came after being asked for a full. I haven’t heard back from the rest of the agents, but the typical response time on an initial query is 1-3 months (if they answer). Then another 3 months to hear back after the full is sent. It’s like trying to close an enterprise deal (heard those take six months to a year). But I’m assuming all my queries will end in rejection and am mentally preparing potential next steps.
Rewrite the novel from scratch, none of this patchwork revision stuff that can't tackle the deeper issues. This is a bitter pill to swallow because who knows how long this will take, but might be a step that separates amateurs from pro’s.
Start a completely new novel from scratch and circle back to Jindo in a year and rewrite from scratch.
Improve my cold email/query letter
My noob sales mind has me thinking. Apparently, a 3% response rate is decent on cold emails. So maybe my query letter’s 13% response rate is decent. Hard to say.
Still, in my next batch, how can I tighten my query letter using the trigger/value prop/call-to-action method? Doesn’t look like my original query even had a trigger or value prop. Maybe I can incorporate things like:
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Jindo targets Millennials, adults who wild out for the Winter Olympics, lovers of irreverent comedy, and anyone interested in authentic Korean American stories. Think Marie Myung-Ok Lee meets Netflix series Beef.
I’m querying you specifically because...[insert 3 x 3 research].
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Will incorporating sales training into literary agent queries increase my odds of landing a book deal?
No idea. But writing is like sales - shouting into the void and understanding that this race is a marathon. Gotta favor the long term. Process over result.
Yours truly,
RIP Ninja
Slanging AI since October 2023
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