Writing a Multi-POV Query Letter
When you’re writing a book with multiple points of view (POVs), you might want your query letter to look a little different from the standard formula.
In a standard query letter, you should have 2 paragraphs summarizing your manuscript and ending on a cliffhanger. If you’ve written a dual-POV story, though, you could set your query letter up like this:
Dear AGENT:
Paragraph 1: introduces your first POV character in their voice, giving their background and initial conflict.
Paragraph 2: introduces your second POV character in their voice, giving their background and initial conflict.
Paragraph 3: brings your two POV characters together and gives the conflict they’re going to face together, along with the stakes if they fail.
Paragraph 4: Metadata and author bio
Sincerely,
AUTHOR
The key to making this work is that your POV characters need to have different voices - they need to sound different to the reader. (This is actually key to writing any multi-POV work - just like no two people speak the same way, your characters can’t either. They need to read as different people, with their own voices and ways of thinking about the world.)
If you write your query letter in this way and people who review it don’t think the first and second paragraphs showcase two different POVs, consider writing a traditional query letter, which would be from one character’s POV, with the other character mentioned as part of the story arc. (Although if this is the case, voice might be an issue that you want to work on in your manuscript before you go forth and query.)
Ultimately, it’s up to you how you write a query letter for a multi-POV manuscript. Pick the format that works best for your story! I find that this formula works best for two POVs, because the query letter still has to be the same length—if you have a multi-POV work, you might just want to pick your favorite character, or the character whose experience is easiest to fit into a summary, and work from there.
In this case, you can signal that it’s a multi POV query letter by slotting that into the metadata: as in “TITLE is a 90,000-word, multi-POV adult fantasy novel perfect for fans of XYZ.”