What Literary Agents Actually Want from Your Opening Pages

What I Learned After 50+ Manuscript Requests, Two Unrealized Offers, and Obsessively Rewriting the Opening Pages of My Third Novel

I’m back in the querying trenches with my third novel, Blue Snow. Though I’ve been fairly successful in garnering responses—five manuscript requests after just a week of querying—I’d like to avoid the query purgatory I faced with my previous two novels, The Lilac Room and The Leverkühn Quartet, which received twenty-four and nine manuscript requests respectively—and two offers of representation that ultimately did not move forward. Therefore, for this new round of queries, I’ve taken it upon myself to perfect my opening pages to absurdity—not just by my standards but also by the standards of the publishing industry.

And boy, have I learned a lot about what literary agents want to see in your writing.