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When I worked at a top literary agency evaluating queries—and at an imprint of Penguin Random House evaluating submissions from literary agents—I saw the same issue time and time again: most manuscripts simply weren’t ready to query.

If you want to increase your chances of landing a literary agent, you need to ensure your manuscript is as polished and compelling as possible before it ever hits an agent’s inbox. Literary agents receive hundreds of manuscripts per week and are looking for polished manuscripts with high potential to sell to a publishing house. Think of it this way: is it easier to sell a move-in-ready home or a fixer-upper?

Agents rarely offer representation to authors based on potential alone; their execution must be strong. But how can you tell if your manuscript is truly ready? It can be so hard to tell.

As a developmental editor who has helped authors get out of the querying trenches and sign deals with Big Five houses, I created a checklist of five questions to ask yourself to determine if your manuscript is really ready to put in front of agents. If you answer yes to all of these questions, go ahead and query with confidence.

1. Is My Hook Compelling?

Here’s the first question to ask yourself if you want to increase your chances of getting published—and it’s something that many writers don’t think about until it’s far too late in the writing process: Is my hook compelling?

Many writers spend time refining their plot, developing their characters, and perfecting their prose, then declare the story done and send it off to agents. All of these elements are critical, but sometimes authors spend so much time focusing on the trees that they fail to see the entire forest.

Having a compelling story premise is just as important as strong execution. With so many other books, TV shows, movies, and other forms of entertainment all vying for your reader’s attention, what’s going to make someone pick up your book and spend hours with it? Agents and publishers are asking themselves the very same question when considering your book.

I know it can feel reductive to distill your complex, intricately woven story into a simple hook, but a strong hook isn’t just a marketing trick—it helps you clarify your story’s true conflict and stakes. It allows you to identify that differentiating factor that sets your book apart from all the others on the shelf.

Let’s look at an example. A weak hook would be something like:

An aging screenwriter struggles to revive his career.

It’s so vague and unspecific—who would want to read that? It might be the most beautifully written book in the entire world, but a boring hook will prevent readers from ever picking it up to begin with.

A better hook would be:

An aging screenwriter gets the opportunity to revive his career when his seminal project from 50 years ago goes viral on TikTok.

Here are some killer hooks from well-known bestsellers:

A lone astronaut wakes up millions of miles from home with no idea who he is or what he needs to do to save humanity. (Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir)
On a desert planet, a young nobleman must navigate deadly political battles to harness the power of a mysterious spice that could change the fate of the universe. (Dune by Frank Herbert)

If you haven’t found your book’s hook yet, try to do it right now—describe the premise of your book in one enticing sentence. If you can’t, think hard about what the differentiating factor of your book is, and then bring that forward in both your query and the manuscript itself.

2. Have I Worked on My Craft?

The next question to determine if you're really ready to query is going to force you to be brutally honest with yourself: Have I worked on my craft?

No matter what you hear, you do not need an MFA or any formal writing credentials to get traditionally published. Many famous authors never took a single creative writing class. Writing is a discipline that you can self-teach by doing. But if you're querying literary agents, you do need to be honest with yourself and evaluate whether your writing is on par with the writing of traditionally published books. If the quality isn’t there yet, your book simply isn’t ready—even if the story idea is the best in the world.

That doesn’t mean you can’t get your writing there, though. What I love about the craft of writing is that you can always improve. Here are some ways to sharpen your writing skills, most of which are totally free:

Watch YouTube writing lessons. Check out my library of craft resources or so many other amazing writing-focused channels out there.
Take writing workshops. These can be virtual or in person.
Read craft books. Some of my absolute favorites are Save the Cat Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody and Story Genius by Lisa Cron. Studying storytelling structure and technique will completely change how you think about crafting your story from the ground up.
Read more. Read widely—inside and outside your genre. Read classics and recent bestsellers. Pay attention to what published authors are doing: how they approach pacing, how they develop their characters, how they deliver a satisfying ending.

Remember that developing your craft as an author doesn’t just mean perfecting grammar rules or learning how to construct beautiful sentences—you must also master the art of storytelling.

3. Is the Story Emotionally Moving?

That brings me to the next question. Your manuscript isn’t ready to query yet if it doesn’t deliver a powerful reading experience from beginning to end. So ask yourself: Is my story emotionally moving?

Remember all the controversy surrounding the ending of the TV series Lost? I won’t spoil it if you haven’t seen it, but many viewers thought the ending was a cop-out that failed to answer the questions they had been desperately seeking answers to over the buildup of six seasons. That deep frustration is exactly what your readers feel when you don’t stick the landing.

If you have a weak, unsatisfying ending, it’ll feel like all of the emotional investment we gave your story was for nothing. I saw this all the time when I worked in publishing—a story would have a gripping premise, and the tension would build so well leading up to the climax, only for it to fall apart in the final act. In most cases, this would move a manuscript from the maybe pile into the rejection pile.

It’s true that if an agent felt very strongly about your story, they might offer a revise and resubmit—where they tell you what issues they had with it and encourage you to re-query them with a revised draft. But ideally, we want to get ahead of all of that before you even submit it to them.

Make sure we care about the characters.
Make us invested in the journey they go on.
Make sure the ending pays off.

A strong ending feels both inevitable yet genius. It should tie up all loose ends and feel earned, delivering a cathartic emotional experience.

Now, that doesn’t mean you have to have a happy ending—tragic endings can be just as powerful. And even if your final scene is open-ended, your story should still feel complete. Ultimately, the final sentiment should feel true to the story you’re telling and move the reader in some way.

If your gut is telling you something might not be working with your ending, trust it—because readers will be able to tell if something feels off.

A great way to diagnose issues in your ending (and in your story in general) is reverse outlining. This means summarizing every scene in your story after you’ve written it, so the outline reflects the draft as it currently stands. Once you have that reverse outline, track your protagonist’s arc:

Do all the choices they make over the course of the story ladder up to the climax and then the ending?
Do they change meaningfully over the course of the novel?
Do all your subplots or secondary storylines resolve in a satisfying way, or do you leave anything hanging?

Don’t rush to query until you’ve resolved all of those issues.

4. Have I taken editorial feedback to heart?

Your answer to this next question might make or break your shot with agents: Have I taken editorial feedback to heart?

Here’s the truth: you’re too close to your own story to see its flaws. Every writer has blind spots, and even the most famous authors have trusted editors to catch their own. They know that after spending months or years with a manuscript, you start to miss things—that’s why external feedback is so critical.

Agents don’t expect a perfectly polished manuscript, but they do expect you to make it as strong as you possibly can. That means leaning on people whose feedback you trust to show you things you can’t see for yourself. That could be:

Beta readers
A critique partner
A professional editor (depending on your needs and goals)

You don’t have to pay for feedback to get traditionally published. But remember: feedback is only as good as the person who’s giving it. Make sure the person you solicit feedback from understands what you’re trying to accomplish with your story and has the skills needed to give you constructive criticism.

But it’s one thing to get feedback, and another thing entirely to listen to that feedback, know how to implement it, and create a stronger story.

If multiple people have pointed out the same issue—maybe your pacing drags in the middle, or maybe your protagonist feels underdeveloped—you should seriously consider it. And chances are, it’s a problem you should address.

A good way to test if you’ve fixed it? Ask your readers again. If they feel your changes resolved the issue, you’ve done a great job. If a new reader goes through the manuscript and doesn’t even bring up that issue at all, that’s also a great sign.

I’m not saying you have to take every piece of feedback you receive—you shouldn’t. Writing is subjective, and you should stay true to your vision for the book first and foremost. If a piece of feedback would take your story in a direction you simply don’t want to go, throw it out.

But before doing that, hear your readers, your critique partner, or your editor out. Their goal is to help you tell the best version of this story. Many times, there’s a solution that doesn’t compromise your vision for the book and still solves the issue they pointed out.

5. Do I feel confident in my story?

Finally, the last question to ask yourself to determine if you're ready to query is also the most important one: Do I feel confident in the story?

At the end of the day, this is your book—your name will be on the cover. So ask yourself honestly: Does this story live up to the idea I had in my head? Am I genuinely proud to share this with someone?

Sometimes, deep down, you know there’s still work to be done. Maybe you’re unsure if a certain subplot is working, or you know you rushed the climax. You can feel in your gut that the book could be better—but you’re tempted to send it off to agents anyway, just to be done with it.

If you feel this way even a little bit, pause right now.

Here’s what to do instead:

Write down what still feels unresolved. What areas of your story are you still unsure about? Try to pinpoint them as concretely as possible—that’s the only way you’ll be able to fix them.
Look at past feedback. Do any of your current concerns align with things others have already pointed out?
Keep working on the manuscript until those issues are resolved. I promise—it’s going to be worth it.

And if you feel too deep in the weeds to sort out those issues right now, take a break from the manuscript. Sometimes, that’s exactly what you need to return to it with fresh eyes.

But remember, I’m talking about making substantial changes to the story. If you’re just tweaking minor things—like a character’s last name or whether you want to include chapter titles—you might either be ignoring larger issues or just procrastinating. If you’re simply fine-tuning for the sake of it, and you feel good about every other aspect of the manuscript, chances are it’s time to let your perfectionism go and send it out.

You probably feel nervous about sending your manuscript to literary agents—that’s totally normal. But if you mostly feel excited about it, and confident in what you’ve produced, that’s a good sign you’re ready for the next step.

And here’s something important to remember:

Once you send your manuscript out to agents, that doesn’t mean you’re done refining it. Many agents will give you editorial suggestions after you sign with them to improve your chances of landing a book deal. And once you do land a deal, you’ll go through rounds of edits with your publisher.

So, the goal of this phase isn’t to make your manuscript 100% perfect—it’s to take it as far as you can on your own so that it’s that much closer to the finish line when agents receive it. If you’re able to do that, I promise you’ll be far ahead of the majority of authors who query before their manuscript is truly ready.

Before sending out your next queries, check your manuscript against my Story Self-Assessment Worksheet—a list of everything I evaluate in manuscripts as a developmental editor. It will help you pinpoint what could be improved in yours.

Thanks so much for reading, and happy writing!