The letter went out on a Monday night in January, eight minutes before midnight by the timestamp in her sent folder, from a kitchen table in Durham covered in seed catalogs. Imani Clarke had rewritten it fourteen times. She almost did not send it at all.
"I kept thinking the next draft would be the real one," Clarke said. "At some point my husband took the laptop out of my hands and asked me how many agents had read the first thirteen. The answer was zero."
She sent it to twelve agents that night. Two days later, Dana Whitlock of Whitlock Literary asked for the full manuscript. On the ninth day, Whitlock called with an offer of representation. Glasshouse Summer, Clarke's debut romance, came out from Rosewater in June and has since become one of the most hand-sold paperbacks of the summer.
Clarke agreed to share the letter exactly as she sent it.
The Letter
Dear Ms. Whitlock,
I am seeking representation for GLASSHOUSE SUMMER, a contemporary romance complete at 94,000 words. On your agency page you wrote that you want love stories where the work matters as much as the kiss. This is a book about two people who fall in love while arguing over rusted iron.
Nell Harrow is a botanist who talks to ferns and not much else. When a small Virginia town wins a grant to restore its 1887 Victorian greenhouse, she is hired to save the plants that survived forty years of neglect. Theo Castellane is the restoration architect hired to save the building. They have one summer, one budget, and one glasshouse that is slowly cracking in the heat.
Nell wants to keep the old fig tree pushing up through the foundation. Theo wants it gone before it takes down the east wing. Neither of them is used to losing, and neither expected to spend July rewiring the misting system at midnight, side by side.
Every pane in that greenhouse was set by someone who believed it would outlast them. Nell and Theo have to decide whether they believe the same about each other.
GLASSHOUSE SUMMER will appeal to readers who love warm workplace romance with a strong sense of place. I spent six years as a grant writer for a botanical garden, where I learned more about glazing putty than any person should. This is my first novel.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Imani Clarke
The Two Sentences She Almost Cut
On draft eleven, Clarke deleted the paragraph about the panes. A writing group friend had told her it sounded "too literary for a romance query," and that agents wanted plot, stakes, and word count, in that order.
"I agreed with her for about a day," Clarke said. "Then I read the letter without those lines and it could have been about any two people in any building. It was accurate and it was dead."
She put the sentences back on draft twelve and never touched them again.
Whitlock says those two lines are why she requested the manuscript within forty-eight hours. She reads roughly 150 queries a week, and most of them, in her words, "describe a book instead of sounding like one."
"The first three paragraphs told me she could build a premise," Whitlock said. "The fig tree, the budget, the deadline. Good. Lots of people can do that. Then I hit the line about the panes and I thought, this person knows what her book is about underneath the plot. That is much rarer."
"I read the letter without those lines and it could have been about any two people in any building. It was accurate and it was dead."
Whitlock pointed to something else writers tend to overlook. The metaphor was earned. It came from the setting, and it did the work of a thesis statement without announcing itself as one.
"I see a lot of queries that end with a big emotional flourish that has nothing to do with the world of the book," she said. "Imani's line came straight out of the greenhouse. It told me the romance and the restoration were the same story. That is what I wanted to sell."
What the Letter Does Not Do
The letter is also notable for what it leaves out. There are no comparison titles. There is no line about the market, no mention of social media following, and only one sentence of biography, which happens to be directly relevant.
"I had comps in drafts one through nine," Clarke said. "They felt like I was dressing up in someone else's coat. Dana told me later she would have asked for comps eventually, but she did not need them to say yes to reading."
Whitlock was blunt about it. "Comps help me pitch a book to editors. They almost never make me want to read one," she said. "A voice does that."
Clarke's advice for writers staring at their own draft number fourteen is short. Read the letter aloud. Cut anything that could appear in someone else's query. Keep the sentence you are secretly proudest of, even if a friend flinches.
"The line I was most afraid of was the one that got me an agent," she said. "I think that happens more often than people admit."
She still has all fourteen drafts in a folder on her desktop, named, simply, "Glass."
Glasshouse Summer by Imani Clarke (Rosewater, 352 pages, $18.99) is out now.
Features writer. Marcus reports on publishing, independent bookstores and how new authors break through.
