What Query Letters Really Ask of Their Recipients

It seems that those who think about such things conventionally think a "query" letter sent by an author looking for a publisher to an editor at a publishing house, or a literary agent they hope will connect them with a publishing house, is asking the recipient "Is this a good book? Yes or no?" with a rejection letter meaning "No, it isn't a good book," and this the sole possible explanation for their declining to publish it.

However, what the query letter really asks, whether the author realizes it or not, is "Are you willing to invest tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in publishing my book? Yes or no?" It is, in short, a business proposition, and a "No" not a verdict on the book's quality, but whether in the circumstances the recipient finds the particular business proposition more attractive than the others available to them at the moment, only a very limited number of which they could take up even were they all attractive. Unsurprisingly their answer to a stranger of whom they have heard, and of whom it seems no one else has heard, asking them that question is almost certain to be "No, we will not invest hundreds or even tens of thousands of dollars in publishing your book"--regardless of what the author has written, the issue likely to be decided even before the matter of quality could even be considered.

Why does the profoundly misleading conventional view of submissions to publishers as being a question about a book's quality rather than the business proposition that is publishing it endure? The reasons are numerous. The most obvious is that making clear the business-like nature of the matter is injurious to the hopes so many have of becoming authors, and thus also injurious to a very lucrative business of exploiting authors' hopes, ranging from publishers hawking "how to" books, to college English departments selling Masters of Fine Arts degrees, to underemployed authors supplementing the sub-poverty "wages of writing" with teaching in and out of "the Academy."

However, beyond that there is the reality that people are generally afraid to speak of the really important things in any area of life, and instead provide them with a bodyguard of irrelevancies. In a society where "economic self-interest" prevails--where, as a practical matter, the view those who have money take of whether or not a thing will be consistent with or opposed to their further enriching themselves as much and as quickly as possible decides what will and will not be done--people are at best squeamish, and often outright cowardly, about discuss hard business realities in all their crassness and cruelty. This is all the more in as they are scared out of their tiny, tiny minds of seeming to criticize the crass, cruel realities of business at all, because that would make them heretics in a land where Anti-Communism is, as Herman and Chomsky had it, the "national religion," and in the United States in particular "You can do it too!" aspirationalism is so much a substitute for any genuine outcome-and-not-"opportunity" consideration of the have-nots. This squeamishness-to-cowardice certainly applies to the nexus between business and culture, given that whether the arts can flourish where business concerns predominate is something about which pretty much anyone who isn't a complete idiot is skeptical at best.

Meanwhile the romance of the arts, literary art included, is central not only to the amour propre of the culture industry's functionaries (few of whom are as honest with themselves, let alone others as Dauriat about what it is they really do), but also to their "moving product." Publishers do not sell books so much as they do authors, and it is important to them that the public think of their authors not as the often mediocre or worse stringers together of words and sentences they often are who just happened to "get the breaks," but rare and special talents, figures touched by magic, "geniuses," such that if they come to their local bookstore they should buy a copy and wait in line to get it signed by the Great Genius themselves. That marketing imperative does not conduce to telling the truth that a great many authors are not just commercially but psychologically invested in this illusion, all the more reason that that category of human not much given to critical thought to begin with are the last to question little inclined to question it--even when what they sign as they so smugly sit in that bookshop is, as is so often the case with those who have been on the bestseller lists long, trash their publishers arranged to be ghostwritten for them to take the fullest possible advantage of the Name that they have one way or other ended up with for as long as works "by" them continue to sell.