Prologues as Pages
One question I’m asked a lot is what to do if your manuscript has a prologue. Do you send the prologue as your sample pages?
The short answer is: yes, if the first pages of your manuscript are a prologue, send the prologue.
The long answer is: make sure you really do need a prologue, and it’s doing a lot of work that can’t be done any other way.
If you read enough writing blogs and publishing threads, and if you follow agents on twitter, you’ve likely come across the adage that publishing doesn’t like prologues. I have no idea if this is true or not, but it should prompt you to ask - why do you have a prologue? What work is it doing for your story?
When I read manuscripts with prologues, either as an editor or as a beta reader, I find that almost all the time, prologues are basically doing one of two things:
One, they’re info dumps - the author using the opportunity to fill the reader in on everything about the world the reader is about to enter. This is usually very boring for the reader, because telling us about the world straight-up lacks tension and plot. We need to know why we care about the world before we get all the information about it.
Two, they’re telling us something that isn’t related to the story we’re about to read. Sometimes this is a scene that happened way in the past, for example, with different characters. Sure, past events may have an impact on your story, and it might be important for readers to know about them for this reason, but there are other ways to get this information across - like having your main character either learn about or recount the event.
The sample pages most likely to grab an agent are ones that pull the reader into the story with an immediate sense of place, plot, and tension. If you’re info-dumping or telling us about a seemingly random event that doesn’t match what we were promised on the back cover (or query!), it’s not going to put your best foot forward. Not for an agent, and not for a reader.
So before you decide that a prologue is absolutely necessary, make sure that you’ve explored all of the other ways you could incorporate that information into your manuscript. Often, this information is even more effective when revealed slowly during the course of the story itself.