Using AI To Write Your Query Letters

AI is now becoming more and more common in our daily lives. For many, they are being told it is a great way to make our lives easier. We can now do better things with our time because of AI. In fact, I have seen recently an ad for a program you can put on your computer that will take all of the notes from an online meeting, organize those notes and even allow you to get a simplified report so you don't have to pay attention. The commercial even shows a guy sitting there eating lunch and not paying attention to the meeting. 

I will tell you, I have attended a lot of meetings where I would have loved to have tuned the speaker out. However, while all of this sounds good, it might not be the best approach.

I was giving a presentation this last year and someone asked about using AI to simply write their query letter. They felt that since they had to send out "so many" of these letters why not try it? My answer was a flat out no. And I continue to say that.

Over the weekend, I received a couple of submissions where the author had clearly used AI to write the letter. How did I know? The number of errors that were made in the letter, combined with the vagueness of responses. The letter used phrases that just did not match anything about the story or even about the authors the writers were comparing their work to. The letter was just a jumble of sentences "attempting to" be a query letter.

Now, I get that you might think, maybe the author was just bad at writing query letters. I get the skepticism, but that weakness in writing query letters is very obvious when someone does it on their own. The letters sound, for lack of a better word, immature. The AI generated letters use sentence structures and word combinations that are too elevated.

Of course these got rejections. Part of it was due to the fact that these were for stories I don't represent or were simply not marketable stories. The other part was the fact the authors felt they had to rely on AI. Let me explain.

If you are an author who wants to be published and make this a career, it means you know how to write. You know how to put words and sentences together to make a meaningful message and story. You understand the basics of Ethos, Pathos and Logos to create an idea on a page that communicates exactly what you want to say. But, if you feel that you need to use an AI program to write a simple business letter, what is this telling the receiver of the letter about your writing ability. I'll take it a step further. We know there are people attempting to write stories using AI. Let's say they get some editor who buys it. How is that writer going to respond when he or she gets revision notes about making global changes to a character's goals, motivations and internal conflicts? Even worse, will that author even be able to duplicate their unique voice for another book? 

Probably not.

Look. I'll be straight forward about this. If you cannot write without having a computer do the work for you, then you are not an author. This might not be the career for you.