Your word count might be hurting your query 👀

Your age category, genre, and length matter more than you think.

Hi authors,

This week has been a dream come true. It warms my heart to see so many of you finally receiving The Modern Guide to Querying Literary Agents! (If you preordered it, keep checking your mailbox — it should be there any day now!)

We’re onto Day 3 of Query Prep Week, so let’s talk about some critical pieces of your query letter that don’t get nearly enough attention:

Your book’s “metadata” (genre, age category, and length).

Your third lesson: understanding what the heck you wrote

Yesterday, you drafted an irresistible description that will make agents dive into your pages. (Here’s the link if you missed it.)

But many agents will check three basic facts about your book before even diving into your description:

• Your genre

• Your age category

• Your word count

These feel like formalities — and some authors leave them out of the query letter altogether. Don’t do that! Agents need to have this information upfront.

Not all agents represent all genres and age categories, so getting those wrong means querying agents who were never going to say yes, no matter how good your pages are.

And a word count far outside the industry norm can hurt your odds: in our survey of agents, 11% cited problematic length as their most common reason for rejecting a query.

Your Day 3 assignment (from the book)

Let’s audit your book’s metadata together to make sure you’re presenting it accurately.

🧑‍🧑‍🧒 Identify your age category. Who is your target reader? Don’t say “everyone!” While your book very well may appeal to people across ages, you need to know who the bulk of your readers will be.

Here are the four age categories typically used in traditional publishing for fiction:

• Picture Book (ages 4–8)

• Middle Grade (ages 8–12)

• Young Adult (ages 12–18)

• Adult (ages 18+)

• Note: New Adult (ages 18–25) is sometimes considered its own category, and sometimes treated as part of Adult.

📚 Nail down your genre. Our book contains an exhaustive list of all the genres available in QueryTracker.

The best way to confirm you chose the right one: read recent books in the genre you think you’re writing in. Would yours appeal to the same readers? Authors regularly discover their book actually belongs somewhere else — and that changes your entire agent list.

Many authors blend elements from multiple genres, which is great, but for querying purposes, you’ll want to identify the primary genre. For example, if you have a novel set in a historical period that also has a romance subplot, it’s probably still historical fiction rather than romance.

📊 Check your word count. Manuscripts that are way over or way under the standard length for your age category and genre are more likely to be rejected. Here are some general guidelines (yes, there are always exceptions, but try to keep within these if possible):

• Picture Book: 500–1,000 words

• Middle Grade: 20,000–50,000 words

• Young Adult: 50,000–90,000 words

• Adult: 60,000–100,000 words

Put them all together at the beginning of your query:

TITLE is an [AGE CATEGORY] [GENRE] novel complete at [WORD COUNT] words.

We know querying is riddled with questions…

These tips are just the start. Our book answers all the questions you’re losing sleep over, like:

❓ How long will agents actually take to respond to my query?

❓ What are the top reasons agents reject queries?

❓ How many queries does the average author send before signing?

❓ How much writing experience are agents looking for in new authors?

❓ What are my real odds of getting an offer of representation?

I’ll be back tomorrow for Day 4’s lesson — where we’ll cover the most dreaded aspect of the query letter.

Happy querying!

Alyssa