To Personalize Or Not To Personalize

To personalize or not to personalize: That is the question. Let's talk personalization in queries.

One piece of common querying advice is to personalize your query letter for every agent you query. This usually involves researching agent bios, interviews, blogs, podcasts, social media, and more. It's a lot of work! And some agents have less of an online presence than others. Another piece of common querying advice is to query widely. This means even MORE work for writers as they seek to find details of personalization for 100 agents (or however many they query). This is exhausting! Because of this, I almost always advise writers to skip the personalization in a query unless they have something super compelling and specific worth mentioning.

Examples include:

• Is there something specific in their MSWL that your manuscript has but isn’t already evident in your query?
• Did they post something about wanting something specific that your manuscript has that isn’t already evident in their query?
• Were you referred to them by one of their clients?
• Is your query in response to a like from a pitch contest?
• Did you meet at a conference or pitch them at a conference, and they invited you to query?

The key part here is "not already evident in your query." If I love fantasy, I'm going to know you're querying your fantasy novel to me for that reason. If you comp to one of my client's books, I'm going to know that's why you're querying me.And honestly, many times writers query me because they're looking for someone who reps their genre and they don't have a super specific reason. This is perfectly fine!

To be clear, it's fine to personalize if you want, but it's not something that you should sweat, particularly if the agent doesn't have a robust online presence or doesn't have specifics on their MSWL. If they are looking for specific things, that's on them to articulate.

In some ways, I think that the advice to personalize every query for every agent contributes to the power imbalance between agents/writers. As an agent, I get that you're querying en masse. I get that you're doing a lot of work with no promise of a financial payoff. I get that your query letter is a basically a form. So, focus your efforts instead on making that form letter—your query—as strong as you can rather than worrying about personalization.

And as agents, if we are looking for specific things, then that's our responsibility to put those things in an updated, easy-to-find, accessible place for writers to reference rather than expect writers to go digging into the archives for that interview I did back in 2019.