Successful Queries: Allison Hunter and "One on One," by Jamie Harrow

Welcome back to the Successful Queries series. In this installment, find the query letter pitched to Allison Hunter for Jamie Harrow's book One on One, recently published by Dutton.

Jamie Harrow grew up on the sidelines of a basketball court since her father was a longtime coach. She wrote a sports column for The Villanovan, the student paper at her basketball-obsessed college. She is a graduate of Harvard Law School and lives in New Jersey with her family.

Here's her original query:

Dear Ms. Hunter,

ONE ON ONE is a contemporary romance, complete at 95,000 words. It features a strong voice and a blend of emotion and wit like YOU DESERVE EACH OTHER, with themes similar to DON’T YOU FORGET ABOUT ME, and a sporty setting like Hannah Orenstein's HEAD OVER HEELS.

Chronic job-hopper Annie Radford needs to stick with her new gig long enough that interviewers stop writing “Flaky?” in the margins of her resume. Unfortunately, that new gig is the last one she wanted: her old position as videographer for her alma mater’s basketball team. Worse, on her first day she learns that layoffs are looming, and she’ll have to outperform her college coworker, Ben Callahan, to make it past the end of the season.

Annie can’t afford another short-term stint in her work history. But data whiz Ben has dedicated his life to Tiger basketball. He’s annoyingly wholesome, hot, and clinging to a grudge against Annie for abandoning him senior year when she quit her internship. They fight to prove themselves indispensable, and Ben is intent on freezing her out. Literally, he’s a thermostat tyrant. She plays dirty too, even though hurling his phone number at every telemarketer on the Internet distracts her from work – work she’s starting to love again.

Inconveniently for Ben and Annie, this is a team sport, and they’re on the same side. Which means spending enough time together to realize (a) why they keep finding excuses for their elbows to touch, and (b) that they misjudged each other. Getting close to Ben means being honest about why she really left the first time, and Annie’s afraid to tell him the former coach he still cluelessly idolizes is actually a predator. But they call it March Madness for a reason: Anything can happen on the way to a national championship. If Annie and Ben can find a way to trust one another, they might be able to save both their jobs, win a title, and build something special together.

I live in New Jersey with my family. I’m a lawyer now, but I wrote a sports column for the student paper at my basketball-obsessed college. This would be my debut novel.

Thank you for considering my submission. I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Jamie Harrow

Content warning: Past sexual harassment

Check out Jamie Harrow's One on One here:

Bookshop | Amazon

(WD uses affiliate links)

Jamie's thoughts around the query:

My query letter went through several iterations before it became the version my agent, Allison, saw. When I initially made a list of agents, I knew she was probably the ideal match for me and ONE ON ONE, but I was afraid to query her because I admired her so much. This ended up working out for me because I got helpful feedback on the manuscript from some of the agents I queried before her. I revised the manuscript and reworked the query based on those changes. I also fiddled with the letter whenever I was stressed about the process, messing with the hook and the comps. I’m not sure how much that helped, but it felt like I was doing something. Fortunately, the version I ended up submitting to Allison was the best one.

I wanted to capture the tone of the book—a combination of fun and serious—and focus on the romance while also making Annie’s personal stakes clear. I experimented a lot with how much to reveal about what she is holding back at the start of the novel. It had to be enough to make agents want to read the manuscript to find out, without giving everything away or bogging the query down in backstory. With my comps, I tried to briefly explain why I was comping each book. I also comped one of Allison’s other clients, Hannah Orenstein, which is not something I did for all agents but was a natural fit here.

Allison Hunter’s thoughts on Jamie’s query:

Jamie’s query jumped out at me because her book featured several of my favorite rom com tropes – it is a sports romance, an enemies-to-lovers romance, and a workplace romance. I also loved that she hinted that the main character, Annie, was harboring a secret – the reason she left basketball the first time. I was immediately hooked and wanted to know what happened. 

And I loved this line – “They call it March Madness for a reason: Anything can happen on the way to a national championship.” – which made it from Jamie’s query to my submission letter, all the way to the catalog copy of the book!

*****

Allison Hunter began her publishing career in 2005 working for the Los Angeles-based literary publicity firm Kim-from-L.A, and was an agent at InkWell Management, the Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency, and Janklow & Nesbit before co-founding Trellis Literary Management in the fall of 2021. Allison is actively acquiring literary and commercial adult fiction, especially focusing on upmarket book club and women’s fiction, romance and rom coms, thrillers and domestic suspense. She loves great storytelling and unforgettable characters, and is always looking for female friendship stories, campus novels, great love stories, family epics, and books about class and cultural identity. She would especially love to find a smart beach read by an author underrepresented in that category. 

In the non-fiction space, Allison is acquiring select memoir, narrative nonfiction, and the occasional prescriptive project. She loves working with journalists and with experts in their field, and is always looking for pop culture, women’s issues and for books that speak to the current cultural climate. Allison has a B.A. in American Studies and Creative Writing from Stanford University and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, she now lives in Austin, Texas, after over a decade in New York City.

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