Below is the query letter that I used when pitching Blood of an Exile to agents. 

Dear [AGENT_NAME], -> Personalize this, don’t be a barbarian.

I’m reaching out to you because I noticed you have an interest in fantasy books, and I have just so happened to write one. Here’s the premise: 

When Lord Silas Bershad was twenty years old, he was betrothed to a princess and commanding his own private army. Life was going great. 

Then the King of Almira executed Silas’ father and banished the young lord. Silas was subjected to an ancient and popular custom: forced to wander the wilderness, hunting the wild dragons that plague the land. It was a death sentence in disguise—no dragon slayer had ever survived longer than a few months after his sentence was passed.

Fourteen years later, Silas Bershad is still very much alive. Sixty-six dragons are dead. He is the most famous person in the Realm of Terra. And he’s pissed about it.

When the King calls Silas back to the capital and offers him a chance at redemption, things begin to change very quickly. The jaded, drunken legend embarks on a dangerous quest to return a runaway princess. He is accompanied by a motley crew, which includes a young lord, a foreign thief, and a dubious assassin. But the further they travel, the more obvious it becomes that the legend of the Flawless Bershad is nothing like the reality of the man. 

There is a reason Bershad has survived all these years. And luck has nothing to do with it.

Blood of an Exile is my 125k word adult fantasy novel. It’s gritty, realistic (just, you know, with dragons), and peppered with a healthy amount of sex and violence. I like to think that fans of Joe Abercrombie and Scott Lynch would be fans of this, too. 

As for me, I was an English major who had a brief stint in the New York publishing world. I eventually defected to tech where I do non-technical things like copywriting, content strategy, and product design.

Would you like to read a bit of the Blood of an Exile?

Best,

Brian Naslund

So, that’s what I used. Results were: 

• 37 Rejections
• 8 Partial MS Requests
• 3 Full MS requests
• 1 Offer of Representation

I started getting partial requests right away, so the query letter itself never really changed.

However, I should mention that I queried in small batches of 5-10 agents and waited to hear back (sometimes for months). In some cases, the agents who rejected me early on provided feedback (in addition to the form rejection). Sometimes it was one sentence, other times it was a few paragraphs.

When that happened, I stopped querying and made revisions based on that feedback. In one instance, an agent advised that all of my character voices sounded the same, so I rewrote everyone’s POV (except for Bershad’s) and resumed submissions.

So, when I was eventually offered representation, my query letter was the same one you see above, but the story itself had changed fairly dramatically.

From my first query letter sent to an official offer from an agent, 2.2 years had passed, my early twenties were long gone, and I had changed jobs and apartments twice.