Is Your Manuscript Ready to Query?

Query readiness is treated as a professional threshold, meaning a manuscript has been structurally rebuilt, category-positioned, and revised until it meets the same standards an agent applies before submitting to editors. It requires a stable point of view and voice, defensible word-count ranges by category, nonfiction-appropriate submission materials, and early attention to legal and ethical considerations when real people, allegations, or identifiable organizations appear. Outside readers, disciplined line work, and clean industry-standard formatting function as the final gate, because premature querying wastes limited opportunities and signals an unfinished draft even when the underlying concept is strong.

Typing “The End” finishes a draft. A query-ready manuscript meets a different standard. For agents and acquiring editors, a finished manuscript reads like a book ready to move into layout after copyedits. The opening, middle, and ending follow a coherent plan, and the chapters appear in a deliberate order. The category and word count match the ranges agents expect for that shelf. Point of view and tense remain consistent from scene to scene, and they read as meaningful choices. Scenes produce specific changes for the characters or the argument, and obvious mechanical errors have already been removed. Pages that miss those marks still belong in revision. Sending them out early burns part of a finite agent list, uses submission chances that are hard to regain, and pulls agents into development work you still need to do yourself.

Readiness begins with a complete, coherent draft from first page to last. That means clearing out “TK” placeholders, “add scene here” notes, half-written chapters, empty brackets waiting for research, and transitions you plan to invent later. If you are still adding, removing, or relocating major sections, you are still drafting. A document whose primary purpose is to demonstrate that you can reach the end is helpful for your development, but it does not warrant professional submission. A manuscript only reaches querying territory after at least one complete rebuild that concentrates on structure, where the story starts and ends, which chapters and scenes earn their place, and how the whole book is arranged, not just how individual sentences sound.

Structural work is the first pass that moves a manuscript from a private draft into something an agent or editor can realistically consider. In fiction, the opening must begin at the point where something in the protagonist’s world changes; the middle must develop and escalate that change; and the ending must answer the central question the book sets up. Stakes must appear early and rise in a way a cold reader can follow without your outline. Character shifts must be legible on the page, not only in your notes. In narrative or idea-driven nonfiction, structure is the spine of the argument or story. You should be able to draw a one-page outline in which each chapter performs specific, distinct work, and the central theme is clear to someone who has never heard you describe the project. If you have never re-ordered or tested your chapters as if you were meeting them for the first time, structural revision is not finished.

Once the internal architecture is in place, the category and length must align with the shelves the book is most likely to inhabit. Agents think in terms of age range and genre because editors, sales teams, and retailers do. If you cannot state plainly whether you are writing for adults, young adults, or middle-grade readers, you are not ready to query. The same is true if you cannot say whether the book is crime, romance, fantasy, science fiction, or a primarily literary work with only minor genre elements. Until those choices are made, you cannot build a focused agent list, agents cannot approach the right editors, and the readers who eventually pick up the book will come to it with expectations the pages cannot meet.

Word count sits inside that same frame. Exact numbers drift over time, but the working ranges are stable enough to matter. For adult fiction debuts, literary and upmarket novels typically range from 80,000 to 100,000 words. Commercial and book-club titles often run between seventy-five and one hundred thousand. Crime and thrillers usually fall between 70,000 and 90,000 words. Single-title romance is frequently between seventy and ninety thousand. Many science fiction and fantasy debuts range from 90,000 to 115,000 words. Young adult novels typically range from 60,000 to 90,000 words. Middle grade often ranges from 35,000 to 55,000. A one-hundred-eighty-thousand-word debut thriller or a forty-five-thousand-word adult literary novel telegraphs a problem before anyone reads the prose. Those manuscripts are not automatically unsellable, but they demand a specific, defensible reason for their length. As a practical rule, if a manuscript sits more than about twenty thousand words outside the usual band for its category, that gap is a structural issue, not a stylistic flourish. Readiness includes trimming or rebuilding to something that is plausibly within range.

Point of view and voice are the following filters. A manuscript that slides from one character’s interior life to another’s in the same scene, shifts tense in the middle of a page, or changes narrative distance so sharply that it sounds like several different authors took turns will read as unfinished. You can test this on paper. Take a representative chapter in close third person and note whose thoughts appear. If interior monologue from multiple viewpoint characters appears inside the same scene and you are not deliberately using a proper omniscient stance, you have head-hopping, not controlled omniscience. Then compare your first ten pages with a section from the middle. If diction, rhythm, and distance from the characters feel noticeably different without any deliberate reason, you are still experimenting. By the time you query, point of view, tense, and narrative distance should read as settled decisions rather than ongoing trials.

Nonfiction has its own readiness tests. For prescriptive work in business, health, self-development, and related fields, the core submission document is a proposal, not a finished manuscript. A working proposal states the concept in a single clear line, defines the primary reader, surveys comparable titles honestly, lays out a chapter-by-chapter structure, and includes sample chapters that read like pages from a finished book. It also answers “why you” in specific terms. That may involve formal credentials, substantial professional experience, a visible platform in the field, or a combination of these that makes you a credible guide for the target reader. For memoir and narrative nonfiction, most agents expect a full, revised manuscript, even if they will glance at a strong proposal first. Unless an individual agent’s guidelines clearly welcome proposal-only memoir, assume the book must be written to the same level of structural completeness as a novel before you query. In all nonfiction, legal and ethical questions are part of readiness. If you name living people, describe identifiable organizations, repeat allegations, or quote documents at length, you should have at least considered privacy, defamation, and permissions before the project enters other people’s inboxes. Agents can flag obvious risks, but they do not replace legal counsel.

Once structure, category, length, and point of view are stable, revision shifts from “does this work at all” to “does every part justify its presence.” That is the stage for scene-level or section-level passes. In fiction, each scene should produce a specific change for the characters or the situation. A decision, a new piece of information, a shift in power or desire, a turn in fortune. If you can lift a scene out and nothing in the rest of the manuscript breaks, that scene is a candidate for cutting or folding into another. Long stretches where characters talk or reflect without consequences, or sequences that reset to the same emotional starting point, signal work that is still in draft mode. In nonfiction, each chapter should advance the argument or deepen the narrative rather than rehash the same case study from slightly different angles. If you find several chapters leaning on the same anecdote or example, with little new information, you probably have one chapter’s worth of material stretched across many.

Only after structural and scene work are complete should you devote a pass to the line. A line edit is functional. The aim is to remove noise that stands between the reader and the substance. That usually means cutting filler such as “just,” “really,” “a bit,” “began to,” “started to,” and similar scaffolding where it adds nothing, tightening doubled phrases that restate the same idea, and replacing vague verbs with precise ones where the stakes are high. It also means fixing sentences that require rereading, not because the thought is complex, but because the phrasing is loose or tangled. As you go, you will see your own habits, such as favored adjectives, stock comparisons, and default sentence structure. The job is to reduce those patterns until they no longer draw attention. This is not the moment to add new scenes, change structure, or introduce a fresh subplot. The only question at this stage is whether each sentence on the page does its work seamlessly.

A final internal pass checks the proof rather than the prose. Spelling, punctuation, continuity, and formatting all belong here. Names must be spelled the same way every time. Time must progress in a sequence that a reader can follow without having to backtrack to check dates. Dialogue punctuation must follow one consistent approach. Quotation marks, apostrophes, and ellipses should be handled the same way on every page. Scene breaks must be unambiguous and consistently marked using a single style. Reading aloud or printing the pages will reveal missing words, repeated words, homophones, inconsistent capitalization, and layout glitches that the eye can miss on screen. A manuscript that opens with obvious typos, broken dialogue, or chaotic layout will be read as an early draft, regardless of the work underneath.

Outside readers are part of readiness, not an optional flourish. At a minimum, one person who is not invested in protecting your feelings and who actually reads in your category should see the manuscript before you query. Ideally, you will have a small mix: a general craft reader, someone who understands the market you are aiming at, and, where appropriate, a subject-matter or sensitivity reader for experiences that are not your own. Give them specific questions. Ask where they lost interest, where they were confused, which characters or arguments they cared about, and whether the ending satisfied the question the book sets up. You are not obligated to follow every suggestion. You are looking for patterns. If several independent readers are bored in the same section, confused by the same relationship, or unsure what the book is fundamentally about, the manuscript has given clear feedback. Keeping a draft entirely to yourself because you are “saving it for an agent” is an attempt to hand an agent work you should have done.

Technical presentation is the easiest part to control and the most likely to betray carelessness. Standard prose manuscript format remains plain: a readable serif font such as twelve-point Times New Roman, double-spaced lines, one-inch margins, left-aligned text, first-line paragraph indents set with styles rather than manual spaces or tabs, page numbers, and a header with your surname and a short title. Scene breaks should be marked in a conventional, consistent way, such as a centered number sign or three asterisks on a separate line. Avoid decorative fonts, color, and layouts that mimic finished book design. Save files in standard formats, such as .doc or .docx, unless an agent specifies otherwise. Use clear file names built from your surname and the title, not jokes or internal shorthand. Above all, follow each agent’s posted requirements exactly. If their guidelines say “paste the first ten pages into the body of the email,” you do not attach a file or send fifty pages because you believe the book improves later.

Sure signs reliably indicate that a manuscript is not yet ready to query. Finishing a draft and compiling an agent list within days, without a complete structural pass, is the first. Planning to “fix the middle” after someone requests the full is another, and amounts to asking a professional to do your development work. Being unable to state the premise in one or two clear sentences without wandering suggests you do not yet understand the book’s core. Drafts that still contain notes to yourself, empty research brackets, placeholder chapters, or unresolved contradictions are unfinished. A second or third volume of a series cannot stand at the front of a submission if there is no first book that works on its own. Manuscripts that sit hundreds of pages outside the normal length for their category, with no precise rationale, are not ready. Neither are manuscripts that no one else has read. If the real reason you are querying is that you are tired of looking at the pages or want the project off your desk, that is fatigue, not readiness.

Some thresholds are practical and legal rather than purely craft-based. If the idea of revising again after an agent or editor offers notes feels intolerable, it will be challenging to function inside commercial publishing, where revision is part of the contract. If your work names identifiable living people, includes allegations of crime or misconduct, exposes intimate medical or financial details, or touches on matters covered by confidentiality or nondisclosure agreements, preparation should consider the story's shape beyond the facts. In those cases, speaking with a lawyer or a very experienced publishing professional before the manuscript leaves your control is part of responsible readiness, especially for memoir and reported nonfiction. If the material is drawn from disputes that are still active, unresolved court cases, or trauma that is still unfolding, more distance may be necessary, not for artistic reasons but to avoid harm once the book is no longer in your hands.