Successful Queries: Andrianna deLone, Tia Ikemoto, and “Town & Country,” by Brian Schaefer

Welcome back to the Successful Queries series. In this installment, find a query letter to agents Andrianna deLone and Tia Ikemoto for Brian Schaefer's debut novel, Town & Country, as well as Brian's thoughts on the query process.

BRIAN SCHAEFER contributes regularly to The New York Times and has written for The New Yorker, New York magazine, and Bloomberg among other publications. He received his master's in creative writing from Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv, where he also worked as a writer and editor for Haaretz. He and his husband live in New York City and the Hudson Valley.

Dear Andrianna,

It’s a pleasure to meet you. I understand you received my query last week from Doris Cooper at Simon & Schuster and are interested in taking a look at the manuscript for my debut novel, THE DUFFLES. I’m thrilled to share it with you (attached), and have included the brief synopsis and bio below.

I look forward to hearing from you, and many thanks again for your interest!

Sincerely,

Brian Schaefer

THE DUFFLES:

The fictional town of Griffin has become a popular weekend getaway for the city’s trendsetters and second homeowners, known among locals as “the Duffles” because of the small satchels they carry as they disembark from trains and cars — the only bag necessary since they won’t be in town past Monday. Will Riley left Griffin for college but has been called home this summer to monitor his volatile younger brother Joe, who is grieving the loss of his best friend from a drug overdose, and to assist their father’s congressional campaign against Paul Banks, an ambitious young carpetbagger. When Will falls in with Paul’s social circle — a clique of affluent gay Duffles — he must hide his identity from them while demonstrating his loyalty to his family.

Spanning the six months to Election Day, THE DUFFLES (literary/upmarket fiction, 86k words) follows a handful of characters as they cross personal and social barriers, both intentionally and unwittingly. This includes Will’s religiously devout mother Diane, who becomes the unlikely real estate agent of choice for many of the gays, and Paul’s much older husband Stan, who lost his brother to AIDS and regards this race as a way to give meaning to his pain. In the age of marriage equality, and against the backdrop of a town undergoing a dramatic economic transition, THE DUFFLES empathetically examines the clash of urban and rural America and considers the responsibilities of part-time neighbors as it explores regional gentrification, the evolution of gay political power, the lingering trauma of AIDS alongside the modern scourge of opioids, and the freedom and fallout that results when people choose, or are forced, to confront familial and communal allegiances.

THE DUFFLES combines the rural setting and political dynamics of Gary Shteyngart’s OUR COUNTRY FRIENDS with the historical weight and communal themes of Rebecca Makkai’s THE GREAT BELIEVERS.

For the past decade my husband and I have split our time between New York City and the Hudson Valley, the model for my fictional rural region, and the home of a 2014 congressional race that loosely inspired the one in this story. I received Bachelors degrees in Dance and Communication from UC San Diego and a Masters degree in fiction from Bar Ilan University in Israel while working for Haaretz newspaper. I have contributed regularly to the New York Times since 2012 and have written about arts and culture for The New Yorker, Bloomberg/Businessweek, Out Magazine and more (www.Brian-Schaefer.com). I am also the co-facilitator of a fiction writing group organized through Paragraph, the New York-based writing space, and a reader for The Line, Columbia University’s veteran literary magazine, and for The Center for Fiction’s First Novel prize.

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What struck me right away about Brian’s query was the fabulous title. It’s a bit ironic, given we’ve changed the title for the actual publication, but still, it stood out in my query pile and made me lean in. Once I read on and realized how the title connected to one of two rival groups of characters, I was even more intrigued.

Brian’s summary does a great job of centering the story’s two main driving forces: a strong setting and sense of place, and the sprawling cast of characters. I’m always looking for a query that makes it clear the writer has a good understanding of their own book (much harder to do than it sounds!), and in reading Brian’s query, it felt like even he understood what were the most compelling elements.

Overall, his query is polished, confident, and sure of itself. It’s a huge plus in my book when an author’s own bio has relevance to the story at hand, and he made sure to include those connections in his note.

There are so many details in Brian’s query that made me excited to dive into this unforgettable book, things that sit high up on my personal wishlist when I’m looking for new authors and stories to champion. First, I was immediately enticed by the novel’s strong sense of place. The more I read, especially from the slush pile, the more I’ve come to realize that a well-developed setting, one that plays a key role in shaping a book’s narrative and tone, has become one of the elements of a query that excites me the most.

I love to travel, live, and learn vicariously through books, and the rural location of Brian’s novel was one I hadn’t spent much time in before. I also appreciated the personal connection Brian had to the story as a writer who splits his time between New York City and Hudson Valley. From his query, I could tell he had spent time deeply considering his own role as a part-time resident, and had something (quite a lot of things, really) to say in this book.

I’m also drawn towards novels that have a healthy balance of plot, character, and theme—the book club triple threat, if you will. Stories that have something to say without sacrificing entertainment to make their point. Between the diverse spread of characters, the timely political and social themes, and the ticking countdown of an electoral campaign, I could already see how this book might plug into a larger conversation about community, intersectionality, and politics, and I was eager to see if Brian could pull off telling a story as compelling as its pitch (spoiler alert: He could!).

Finally, Brian did all of this with a level of stylistic execution and market acuity that showed me he understood the book he had written and where it would fit in on shelves. His pitch was so selling that much of it made it onto the final jacket copy of the book; I hope it grabs you just as it grabbed me.

My background is in journalism, and as a freelance journalist, I spend half my time formulating pitches to editors, making the case for why a particular story is compelling, illuminating, and timely, and why I’m the best person to tell it. I also always try to keep these pitches tight and efficient, getting straight to the thesis, padding it with only the necessary supporting information, enough to give an editor a sense of scope while making them want to learn more. I think that practice really served me in formulating the query for my novel.

I did a lot of research before querying, reading samples and online interviews with agents, listening to literary podcasts to learn the dos and don’ts of query writing. And I approached it as a piece of prose: every word justified, every sentence in the right place—it’s the calling card to my writing.

I knew early in the querying process that mine was working. I had a healthy response rate and a good number of requests for manuscripts, which gave me the reassurance to stick with it when that interest didn’t lead to offers. My confidence in my query’s effectiveness was an important ingredient in my persistence, which I needed because I queried nearly 50 agents over two years before Andrianna and Tia saw my book the way I saw it, and had a vision for how to position it in the marketplace. Even though my query didn’t get me quick representation, it got me the right representation (and, I believe, the best representation!), so I’d say it did its job well.

*****

Based in the Creative Artist Agency’s New York office, Andrianna deLone represents a wide range of fiction and nonfiction authors, including cookbook authors. She began her career at ICM in 2017 and joined CAA in 2022 following the agency’s acquisition of ICM. Originally from San Diego, she graduated from Vanderbilt University with degrees in English and Political Science. She is also a graduate of Columbia University’s Publishing Course.

Based in CAA’s New York office, Tia Ikemoto represents a diverse range of nonfiction and fiction across the commercial to literary spectrum. A Bay Area native, Ikemoto graduated from UC San Diego with a degree in Communication and a Minor in Business before moving to New York to pursue a career in publishing. Following internships at Writers House’s San Diego and New York City offices, she joined ICM Partners in 2019 where she assisted the co-head of the Publishing department before starting to build her own list. She joined CAA in 2022 following the agency’s acquisition of ICM and was promoted to Agent in 2024.