The query for this type of nonfiction will end up looking very similar to a novel query, especially if you’re writing a memoir. Include these elements, in no particular order (except the closing):

• Personalization: where you customize the letter for the recipient
• What you’re selling: genre/category, anticipated word count, title/subtitle
• Hook: a compelling description of the narrative
• Target readership: who will buy this book and why? (it cannot be everyone and anyone)
• Your bio, platform and credentials to write the book
• Closing

If you have confidence about the compelling nature of a personal narrative, start with that. Example: “When I was eighteen years old, I moved from my hometown in Oregon (population: 7,500) to live with the most powerful man in Hollywood and be a nanny to his three children.”

Beware of tired story lines

Whether you’re writing memoir or nonfiction narrative, you need to boil down your story to these three key elements:

1. Protagonist and her conflict
2. The choices the protagonist has to make (the stakes)
3. The sizzle

What does sizzle mean? It’s that thing that sets your work apart from all others in the genre, that makes your story stand out, that makes it uniquely yours. Sizzle means: this idea isn’t tired and hasn’t been done a million times before. When it comes to memoir, there are a lot of tired storylines out there. In this agent roundtable on memoir in Writer’s Digest in 2010, you can get a feel for what makes agents’ eyes glaze over:

• “On some days it seems as though every therapist in the country who is dealing with addicts of one kind or another has told them to journal their recovery and then turn it into a book. Quitting booze or drugs is a good thing to do, but it isn’t the triumph of the human spirit.”
• “I’m sick of dysfunctional family stories, but I’m a big fan of memoirs by people who have lived lives the rest of us only dream of.”
• “Though books by cancer and disease survivors are prevalent, I find them very tough to sell to publishers unless the survivor has some kind of name recognition.”
• “I try to steer [writers] away from, ‘I was born in a big/small town, and I liked listening to punk music, and I hated my mother and blahdee blahda blah blah.’”

Sometimes great stories or manuscripts can fail at query stage because there is no life, voice, or personality in that query. Sometimes so-so hooks can be taken to the next level because they convey a liveliness or voice that is seductive. You want to be one of those seductive writers, of course—this becomes crucial for memoir, which tends to sell on the basis of voice when you’re not a celebrity.

But the honest truth is that a good number of nonfiction narratives have been conceptualized or executed in a way that makes them unsuitable for the commercial market. I comment on this further in Common Reasons Nonfiction Books Don’t Sell and Why Your Memoir Won’t Sell.