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Oh, right: querying
Tuesday, December 10th, 2013 06:36 pmFortunately I've been better at doing it than I have at writing it up. ;-)
So, Saturday I went to a gathering organized by a local writing group, with possibly the only literary agent who lives in my state. (Hub of the publishing universe, we are not.) Part of the program was that folks could bring query letters and she would read and comment on them, so I figured even if she wasn't a good match for me, I might get some useful feedback. Sustained by the little bits of cheese I kept finding in random corners, I eventually made my way through the local college campus to the meeting room, where there was a turnout just exactly equal to what the room could reasonably accommodate. So far so good.
Then I sat through Remedial Queries For The Clueless. I can't blame the agent for this; most of the attendees were taking notes assiduously, and from some of the questions it seemed they really needed the primer. But -- seriously, people, fifteen minutes with Google? You're going to an event where an agent has offered to critique query letters, and it doesn't occur to you to maybe look up what a query letter is?
I practiced my nodding and smiling, and we moved on to the meat of the gathering. The queries themselves were surprisingly decent; there were a few obvious beginner mistakes, but most of them were generally on the right track. (There were about 2/3 as many queries as attendees; how this correlates with half of the audience evidently needing Remedial Queries, I have no explanation.) My own left the agent rather confused (though this may have been because it was the last one, and she was hurrying before the library shut down on us); I managed to squeeze in a quick question about it afterward, and I'm glad I did, because the sentence she pointed to as the source of her trouble was the last thing I would ever have thought to look at. (Not sure how much I want to revise based on a single data point, but at least I know.)
In fact this agent would not a good match for me, so I won't be formally querying her. (Though it was extremely kind of her to give her time & input to the local writing community like this; she gets major kudos for that.) However, I definitely think the event counts as that seven-days' querying effort.
So, Saturday I went to a gathering organized by a local writing group, with possibly the only literary agent who lives in my state. (Hub of the publishing universe, we are not.) Part of the program was that folks could bring query letters and she would read and comment on them, so I figured even if she wasn't a good match for me, I might get some useful feedback. Sustained by the little bits of cheese I kept finding in random corners, I eventually made my way through the local college campus to the meeting room, where there was a turnout just exactly equal to what the room could reasonably accommodate. So far so good.
Then I sat through Remedial Queries For The Clueless. I can't blame the agent for this; most of the attendees were taking notes assiduously, and from some of the questions it seemed they really needed the primer. But -- seriously, people, fifteen minutes with Google? You're going to an event where an agent has offered to critique query letters, and it doesn't occur to you to maybe look up what a query letter is?
I practiced my nodding and smiling, and we moved on to the meat of the gathering. The queries themselves were surprisingly decent; there were a few obvious beginner mistakes, but most of them were generally on the right track. (There were about 2/3 as many queries as attendees; how this correlates with half of the audience evidently needing Remedial Queries, I have no explanation.) My own left the agent rather confused (though this may have been because it was the last one, and she was hurrying before the library shut down on us); I managed to squeeze in a quick question about it afterward, and I'm glad I did, because the sentence she pointed to as the source of her trouble was the last thing I would ever have thought to look at. (Not sure how much I want to revise based on a single data point, but at least I know.)
In fact this agent would not a good match for me, so I won't be formally querying her. (Though it was extremely kind of her to give her time & input to the local writing community like this; she gets major kudos for that.) However, I definitely think the event counts as that seven-days' querying effort.
