Onefinemess

Last April, I think I did a post (or several!) for every day of April, as an “unofficial month of blogging“.  Wow.  Where did I get the time?  We had a 2yr old and a 1 month old!  I wasn’t even going to try and compete with that this year, but I’m trying to do at least 5 posts a week.  So, here’s another.

I sent out 21 queries for my first book yesterday.  It took quite a while to prep them as, in addition to any customizations I altered for the text of the actual queries, almost every agent had a different set of requirements… here are some requirement combinations (my spell checker is telling me the plural of ‘combination’ is not a word.  Really spellcheck?!):

1. email query only
2. email query with synopsis in body of email
3. email query with synopsis and 1st 5 in body of email
4. email query with 1st 5 in body
5. email query with 1st 10 in body
6. email query with synopsis and 1st 10 in body
7. email query with 1st 50 in body
8. email query with 1st 10 as attachment
9. email query with 1st 10 and synopsis as separate attachments
10. email query with 1st 3 chapters as attachment
11. email query with 1st 3 chapters pasted into body
12. email query with 1st 3 chapters & synopsis pasted into body
13. web form, query only
14. web form, query, 1st 10 & synopsis all in single .doc file

Basically, any combination of the various options & email, plus a few webforms for kicks.  It was tricky keeping track of who wanted what, but I think I got it all punched out – ywriter turns out to be really handy for query organization too.  I may do a separate post on this, just so people googling around for ‘query organization’ or something like that have it as an option.  Need the time to set up a dummy file, take & organize screenshots…

Once I get all my rejections (and hopefully some non-rejections) back, I’ll post the stats, for those that are curious.

Also, I hate synopses.  They are evil.  If you want to see the life sucked right out of your book, synopsize it!  But seriously, I suppose it may be the sign of a skilled writer – writing a beautiful synopsis that is.  Then again, it may be an entirely separate skill.  All I know is, I don’t have it.  Yet.  I’ve seen it mentioned that one may want to start with a synopsis, then flesh it out as you write the book.  I think this might work a little better for me.   Going to try that for the next one.

Double also, I’m messing with my stylesheet – does the bold on the hyperlinks inside posts make them more noticeable?  I could barely see them with just the color shift included in the template.

Tags: blogging, queries, ywriter

This entry was posted by onefinemess on Friday, April 23rd, 2010 at 8:05 am and is filed under Netlife, queries, writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.