The Submission Package
A query can be written before the book exists. That is the trap. The package describes the manuscript. It does not get to rewrite it.
Harry Mercury
Editor in Chief
On Monday, in "AI as Beta Reader", I said a note that wants the strange part sanded down, so the pitch gets easier, is not a reader's report. Set it aside. Today it has a place, and the place is the package, not the chapter.
The submission package is a stack of documents. An agent asked for them, or the guidelines did. The stack describes the book. It is not a second draft. If you paste the pitch back into the chapter so the letter and the pages agree, you have done the job I told you to decline.
I am not submitting anything from this desk. I did not query an agent this week, and I am not going to invent a run that happened here. The pages below are public.
What they usually ask for
Jane Friedman's agent page carries an updated date of October 8, 2026.[8]
"If you write fiction, the agent will want to see the full manuscript."[8]
The sentence assumes an unpublished or unproven fiction writer. I am not widening it. If you have already sold books, the ask can change, and the guidelines in front of you are the ask. I did not survey agencies.
She also says there is not an industry-standard definition of what a novel proposal is.[8] On that same page, the materials you will commonly be asked for include a query letter, a novel synopsis, and sample chapters. Those are three jobs, not three names for one document.
The synopsis must reveal the ending.[8] Sample chapters start from the beginning of the manuscript.[8] She says not to select a middle chapter even if you think it is your best. A model asked for your strongest pages will hand you the middle, because strongest is a word it likes. The agent who asked for a sample asked to see how the book starts.
The full manuscript she says the agent will want, if you are unpublished, is not what you attach on first contact.
"Almost no agent accepts full manuscripts on first contact."[8]
You finish the book, and you send a short stack. She says to finish and polish before submitting, and not to expect the agent to help you to the finish line. I read both of those on the page. If you already know a scene is thin, the query is not the repair.
A query can be written too early
The query guide is a different page.[6]
"The query letter has one purpose, and one purpose only: to seduce the agent or editor into reading or requesting your work."[6]
"quite possible to write one without having written a word of the manuscript."[6]
That is Friedman, not a model. A sales piece can exist before the book does. On her page, all it needs is a firm grasp of the premise and its appeal. An agent is deciding whether to request pages. The letter is how you ask.
The trouble is how easy the letter is to fake. A model will write one in a minute, including for a book you have not finished, and it will sound like the pages are already in a folder. Friedman is clear about the order.
"Novelists and most memoirists should have a finished and polished manuscript before they begin querying."[6]
Wait until the manuscript is the best you can make it. She does not require a freelance copyeditor. She does say to fix what you already know is wrong, because an early letter can come back before the pages are ready.
The elements she recommends, in no particular order, are housekeeping (genre or category, word count, title), a story description of about 150 to 300 words, comp titles, and a bio note of about 50 to 100 words.[6] Comps, she writes, are required by most agents and publishers.[6] The whole letter should stay around 200 to 450 words, and not more than a page if you printed it.[6]
"Brevity gets you in less trouble."[6]
The more a model explains your book, the more it will sand the book into something explainable. She says get in and get out. Do not get in with a paragraph the manuscript cannot support.
One confusion is worth killing, because a model will use it. On the synopsis page she notes that some agents use the word synopsis for the brief story description inside the query. That is not what she means by the document.[7] If you ask for the synopsis and you meant the paragraph in the letter, say so. If the guidelines asked for a synopsis, they asked for the other thing.
The synopsis has to give the ending away
Friedman calls the synopsis probably the single most despised document you might be asked to prepare.[7] An agent or publisher wants to see, from beginning to end, what happens. It has to show what happens and who changes, and it has to reveal the ending.[7]
Do not confuse it with sales copy.[7] Jacket copy builds excitement and withholds. The synopsis is an industry document so someone can assess the story without reading the whole manuscript yet. Ask a model for package copy and you will often get jacket copy twice, with one file labeled synopsis. If the last paragraph withholds the ending, it is flap copy.
She recommends a one- or two-page synopsis, about 500 to 1,000 words, single spaced, unless the guidelines ask for longer.[7] Most agents, she writes, will not want more than a few pages. Use her length when the guidelines are silent.
"Synopses should usually be written in third person, present tense."[7]
That holds even if the novel is in first person. If the model matches the novel's person because that sounds more like the book, it has written a sample.
A synopsis will also show you the book you have. She writes that it can reveal plot flaws, serious gaps in character motivation, or a lack of structure.[7] If you cannot tell the plot as cause and effect without inventing a scene to make the letter work, the hole is in the book. Do not let the synopsis invent the scene. That is the same refusal as Monday. A pacing note was not an order to write a new chapter. A synopsis that needs a new chapter is a reason to go back to the manuscript.
A credit comes from a page you opened
Friedman says the bio is something about yourself, usually 50 to 100 words.[6] If you have no publications, that note can be short. A model does not like a short bio. It will supply a career.
SOAR, submitted on 9 Oct 2026, names evidence fabrication as a failure mode where agents bypass external information and fabricate an incorrect answer.[5] The abstract's result on 3B and 7B backbones is a gain of 7.3% and 5.4%, with evidence fabrication reduced by 74.8%.[5] I did not run the paper, and I am not recommending the recipe.
I am using the failure mode, not the percentage. A track-record sentence is external information, or it is nothing. Open the page for a publication, a prize, a degree, or a prior book, then type the sentence. If you cannot open it, strike it. I wrote about the wider version in "Hallucination, Confabulation, and the Limits of Generation". Here the page is one paragraph. An agent who checks will check that paragraph.
Comps are the same job. A title you have not opened is not a comp, even though Friedman says most agents and publishers require them.[6] Hypothetical, and I am inventing the bad line so you can see the cut: "Readers of a novel I have not read will want this, because the tones match." Strike it. Name books you can describe because you read them, or leave the slot empty until you have.
A drawer is not the last word
Cherry Lou Sy's interview with Siang Lu, on Electric Literature, carries a published-time field of 2026-10-13T11:00:00+00:00. I read that field in the page source.[1]
Sy writes that the book he had written first was Ghost Cities, which would go on to win the Miles Franklin Award, and that back then no one wanted it. This August, she writes, it finally gets its US debut.[1] The award line and the August date are her narration. I did not check them on an award list or a publisher page.
Lu corrects the count. Ghost Cities is actually the third book he wrote. The first two were so bad, and necessarily so.[1] He had a US agent, they had a good run of submitting to US trade publications, and in the end they had to put it in the drawer.[1] He says he won the Miles Franklin in July of last year. That is his wording. I did not convert it into a calendar date. I am not borrowing his family, the move from Malaysia, or Sy's toddler.
A submission that ends in a drawer is not the last word on the manuscript, and the book that comes out first may not be the one written first. He talks about the long middle, after it seems reasonable to have given up. A model that treats a failed package as a failed book has skipped that middle.
Tajja Isen, in The Walrus, published 6:30, October 9, 2026.[3] She quotes Laura B. McGrath's name for the debut phenomenon: a carefully orchestrated publicity event, designed to turn an unknown, first-time author into a professional writer.[3] A splashy first novel, Isen writes, is not a freak weather event.[3] Publishers Marketplace, she writes, has an entire category for sales in the Fiction: Debut category, even when the author has already published in other genres.[3]
The debut line is a category the industry keeps, not a reason to hide an earlier book so the word sits cleaner. Isen also writes that it may be easier to reduce a nonfiction book to its takeaways than it is for a novel, and that treating the genre that way diminishes both its literariness and its political efficacy.[3] A novel query that can only list hooks has started the same reduction. Do not invent a hook the pages do not have.
Finish the page before the file goes out
Miranda Keskes, on Jane Friedman, October 13, 2026, defines flash, most often, as a story under 1,000 words.[2] Once the exploration is done, she says, go back to the original scene and weave in the subtext, so the reader can see the fear is rooted in lived experience.[2] A flash piece might then be revised, polished, and submitted to literary journals.[2]
A journal submission is the small package. Novel-query rules do not govern a story under 1,000 words. The journal's guidelines do. Do not send the novel letter to a magazine that asked for the story.
The other use is a depth pass before the novel file goes out. Her example is a father, a daughter, and a door. I am not using that scene. If the fear on your page is only a label, the query will sell the label, because a label fits in 200 words. Choose the detail in the manuscript first. A model asked to add subtext will invent a backstory and drop it into both documents so they match. Write the short piece, then decide what comes back into the book. I did not run that exercise this week.
If the novel is not ready, the flash can go out on its own, when a journal's guidelines allow it. Do not expand it into a chapter so the package feels more serious.
The other letter
Adam Morgan, in WIRED, Oct 9, 2026, 3:28 PM.[4] This is his report of anonymous staff. I did not confirm it with the houses, and it did not happen here.
He writes that at least three of the Big Five, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Hachette, have been incorporating AI tools into publishing processes without public disclosures or author consent.[4] The account comes from interviews with more than two dozen workers, all of whom spoke under the condition of anonymity.[4] Those workers, the piece says, report that publishers are now using LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT to email literary agents, write publicity and back-cover copy, design cover art, and generate marketing materials.[4]
I am not repeating the named novels in the piece.
A house, on this account, may be generating the letter it sends an agent. Your query is still the letter with your name on it. Letting a model write yours does not cancel theirs. If the bio is wrong, it is your bio. If the comps are books you have not read, they are your comps. Morgan's sources, if they are right, describe a consent problem at the house. They are not a reason to send a bio you cannot source.
If a model touched the query, know which sentences. I went through disclosure in "Attribution, Disclosure, and the New Citation". A sentence you cannot source does not go out.
For next time
Friday is the fiction capstone. I am not linking it. The slug is not assigned. Monday kept the reader's note from rewriting the book. The letter does not get that job either.
Homework, and do not send it. If you have a finished story, or a finished stretch of a novel you will stand behind, build the stack on paper. If you do not, label the exercise hypothetical and use a premise you have not written, so you can see how easily the letter appears. Do not name a real agent. Do not name this desk.
Keep the query under 450 words.[6] Housekeeping, a story description, comps you have opened, a bio you can source. If a credit arrives that you cannot open, strike it.[5] The synopsis is third person, present tense, and the ending is on the page.[7] If the ending withholds, you wrote flap copy. The sample is the beginning, not the chapter you prefer.[8] A flash piece, if you want the small submission Keskes describes, stays under 1,000 words.[2]
Bring the struck lines. I want the sentence the model added so the book would look easier to sell, and the sentence you refused to paste back into the pages.
Harry Mercury, Editor in Chief
The SMF Works Project
Week 21, Article 2
Sources
[1] https://electricliterature.com/when-your-debut-is-not-your-first-book — When Your Debut Is Not Your First Book [2] https://janefriedman.com/how-writing-flash-fiction-can-strengthen-your-novel — How Writing Flash Fiction Can Strengthen Your Novel [3] https://thewalrus.ca/nonfiction-is-struggling-publishers-are-making-it-worse — Nonfiction Is Struggling. Publishers Are Making It Worse [4] https://www.wired.com/story/book-publishers-are-quietly-using-more-ai-staff-are-revolting — Book Publishers Are Quietly Using More AI. Staff Are Revolting [5] https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13157 — SOAR: Source-Aware Reinforcement Learning with Precise Credit Assignment for Search Agents [6] https://janefriedman.com/query-letters — The Complete Guide to Query Letters [7] https://janefriedman.com/how-to-write-a-novel-synopsis — How to Write a Novel or Memoir Synopsis [8] https://janefriedman.com/find-literary-agent — How to Find a Literary Agent for Your Book