5 Things to Know About Sample Pages

Agents will almost always request “sample pages” from you when you query them. They’re looking for you to send five, ten, twenty, sometimes even up to fifty pages from your manuscript, so they can get a sense of your writing. 

So what do you need to know about sample pages? 

Send your first pages. 

Do you think your manuscript’s first pages are boring, and you’d be better off sending pages from the middle? If so, rewrite your first pages! 

Agents are always looking for the first pages of your book. They want to be hooked, like you are when you pick up a great book and start reading. If the first pages are boring, you’re not going to go read the middle. You’re going to put the book down. 

Send the right number of pages.

Agents are going to realize if you’ve sent them the entire manuscript because you hope they’ll be so hooked they’re just going to keep reading. 

Don’t do this. 

Make sure that you only provide the number of pages an agent asks for, even if that means you’re only providing part of a chapter. 

These are double spaced pages. 

You can’t get around the word limit by making your lines single spaced with tiny margins! Agents will notice if you’ve sent them way more material than they’ve asked for. When you’re getting hundreds of queries a month, I imagine this could be somewhat off-putting. 

Most agents don’t accept attachments. 

Pay careful attention to the instructions of any agent accepting queries by email. Most will not accept email attachments, so if you attach a word document with your sample pages, your query could get automatically deleted. This is for the safety of agents’ systems (who wants to risk getting a virus on their computer?) and also because again, agents are opening hundreds of queries a month. Who wants to wait for all those attachments to load, and deal with the inevitable technological errors? 

So make sure that you follow directions! 

Make sure your sample pages shine. 

Finally, you want to put your best foot forward in your opening. It’s always better to start with action to grab a reader’s attention, as opposed to a long, introspective monologue from a character we don’t care about yet, because we don’t know them. Give your sample pages to beta readers, and ask them if they’d be hooked, or if they think you should start at a different place in your story, or rework the beginning. These pages deserve a lot of editing attention from you for a good reason—they’re basically tasked with selling your book to a potential reader!