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Hooks That Catch an Agent’s
Attention
Is there anything more important in a query letter than thehook? You get one sentence
 – 
the first one
 – 
to grab anagent by the throat and convince her/him to read thesecond sentence, then the second paragraph, then requestan excerpt. On the shoulders of one sentence rest theweight of years of work, months of rewriting and weeksof stress.How do you write that sort of sentence? Noah Lukeman isgenerous when he gives you five pages in his book,
TheFirst Five Pages
. No writer gets five pages. So how doyou get an overworked, under-excited agent to read pastyour one-page query letter?
The great hooks are all used…
 
Call me Ishmael (Moby Dick)
 
Mam died today; or yesterday, maybe, I don‟t know ( 
The Stranger)
 
 As Gregor Samsa aawoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed inhis bed into a gigantic insect (The Metamorphosis)
 Whatever you write will be second to those above
. Here’s a group of first lines I collected from
NYT Bestsellers. See what you think of them:
 Hood got partnered up with Terry Laws that night, another swing shift in the desert, another hundred and fifty miles of motion on ashphalt, another Crown Victoria Law Enforcement  Interceptor that would feel like home.
 
 He should never have taken that shortcut 
 
 Eamonn Dillon of Sinn Fein was the first to die, and he died because he planned to stop for anpint of lager at the Celtic Bar before heading up the Falls Road to a meeting.
 
The naked child ran out of the hide-covered lean-to toward the rocky beach at the bend in thesmall river.
 
If you’re like me, none of those even got close to
Call me Ishmael
.I found this next list of hooks on a writers site.They are proferred as top-notch openers for query letters (Truth be told, I think I can do this good, even on my normal days):
“Under a low sun, pursued by fish and mounted by crows and veiled in a loud languid swarm
of blue
bottle flies, the body comes down the river like a deadfall stripped clean.”
 
 
 – 
The opener of 
Finn, a Novel
 , by debut author Jon Clinch [Random House]. From his agent  Jeff Kleinman, Folio Literary Management 
 
“A brother shows you who you are – 
and also who you are not. Your family has a certain flavor or smell unlike any other. It has an ethos, perhaps even a mythology all its own. You
are a „we‟ with your brother before you are a „we‟ with any other.” – 
The hook for the anthology
Brothers: 26 Stories of Love and Rivalry
by David Kaczynski,
about his brother, Ted, known as “The Unabomber” [Jossey
-Bass/Wiley]. From the agent  for the project, Andrew Blauner 
 
“The reader is plunged into the world of an American teenager living in a bewitching foreign
city while attempting to rebuild her shattered life after the death of her parents.
 
She finds herself in the most typical teenage condition
 – 
falling in love with the most untypical person imaginable: an eighteen-year-
old Resistance fighter who died in 1942.” – 
The hook for 
Sleepwalking
 , by debut YA novelist Amy Huntington, which sold recently in amajor 3-book deal, ($500K and up) for publication in Summer 2011, 2012, 2013 [Harper 
Children‟s].
From her agent Stacy Glick, Vice President at   Dystel & Goderich Literary Management 
 
“I am a Seattle writer with two
 published novels. I have recently completed my third novel,and I find myself in a difficult situation: My new book is narrated by a dog, and my current agent told me that he cannot (or will not) sell it for that very reason. Thus, I am seeking newrepres
entation.”
 
 –The hook in an initial query from “emerging” author  
Garth Stein ,whose novel
The Art of Racing in the Rain
ended up snagging a $1.2 million book deal and has so far sold more than750K copies; on the New York Times best seller list for the past 31 weeks [Harper]. Fromhis (new) agent, Jeff Kleinman, Folio Literary Management 
 
“The Beijing „08 Olympics are over, the war in Iraq is lost, and former National Guard 
medic Ellie McEnroe is stuck in China, trying to lose herself in the alien worlds of  performance artists and online gamers.When a chance encounter with a Chinese Muslim dissident drops her down a rabbit hole of conspiracies, Ellie must decide whom to trust among the artists, dealers, collectors and 
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