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Literary agent Rachelle Gardner has an interesting post up today about query letters. It seems that a group of writers got together, worked on their query letters together then hired someone to submit them. The problem is the person who was hired didn’t properly research the agents or their guidelines, resulting in rejections for the writers and, I would guess, a waste of their time and money.

It’s a wonderful idea that in our busy life, we can concentrate on writing and leave the submitting to someone else, but, if you have spent all this time making your book the best that it can be, would you want to leave its future up to someone else?

Now, I’ve never used or even researched services such as these, and maybe there are good ones. But, if you’re going to use one, let Rachelle’s post be a cautionary tale and research them well.

However, keep in mind this: No one will care about the future of your book more than you. No one will care enough to spend the time researching agents for just the perfect ones, researching their submission guidelines and tailoring the query letter to them specifically. All of these things will give your book its best chance of getting noticed, so they’re all important and should be done right.

Remember literary agent Jennifer Jackson’s Letter From the Query Wars blogs posts: Last week she read 205 queries and asked for partials from 3 — just 3 out of 205! Imagine if out of those 205, she had 12 that all read the same way, were received the same day one after another and didn’t follow her guidelines, like those Rachelle received. Do you think any of those 12 would have been in the 3? I’m sorry to say that I don’t think so. As Rachelle pointed out, even if all those 12 were great query letters and did follow her guidelines, Jennifer wouldn’t be interested in following up on 12 books that are all the same. And she’d probably be a little suspicious. I would.

Don’t short-change your book. After you’ve done all the work on writing and revising your manuscript, take the time to write a great individual query letter that will stand out in the crowd; research the best agents for your particular work — not just your genre, but your style too — research their guidelines, the ones from their website not a book that might not be up to date; research their style of working, read their blog if they have one, their clients, their clients’ books to make sure your work will fit with them; then tailor your query letter to each one of those, personalizing the letter.

Give your book the best advocate it can have: You.

Write On!

I’ve written about this a few times before, and the more I read about query letters, the more I see that spending time making your query perfect is as important as time spent making your manuscript perfect.

Literary agent Nathan Bransford had a post this week about working with new agents and in it, a link to a speech by best-selling author Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook, etc.) about how he got his agent. Have a read. It’s a fun piece. But here’s the part I want to point out:

A typical agent in New York gets 400 query letters a month. Of those, they might ask to read 3-4 manuscripts, and of those, they might ask to represent 1 The odds are tough, but not impossible, and that’s why I believe that a good query letter is the single most important page that any unknown, unpublished author will ever write.

I worked hard on mine; 17 drafts over two weeks and I did my best to make sure every word counted.

Nicholas Sparks’ success is unquestionable, and his road to publication began when he spent two weeks writing and revising his query letter. (Note that, if you read more of his speech, he got nos from all the agents he sent to except a new agent who had been passed his query from someone else in that agency. So, even after two weeks of work, the odds were still tight.)

To show how competitive this is, check out literary agent Jennifer Jackson’s blog every Friday when she posts Letters From the Query Wars. At the top, she lists the number of queries she read this week, the number of partials/manuscripts she requested and their genre. This past week, she read 158 queries and requested 0, none, nada.

There are a number of possible reasons for this, including a query letter could be brilliant but not her cup of tea. But all 158 of them? I doubt it. Those query letters really need to shine.

I’ve also written before about being picky when it comes to getting an agent. New writers often feel so grateful for any attention that they’ll sign on the dotted line for anyone with a pulse and an interest. But this is our career that we’re setting up, and an agent is someone we’ll work with for a long long time. So, it’s ok to be choosy and make sure it’s a good match. (This is why it’s important to research the agents you send to before you send out your queries.) Check out this post from literary agent Rachelle Gardner about the best way to fire an agent — a situation you don’t want to be in. The post is very interesting and offers great advice. But here’s something I thought was good in one of the comments:

I made a mistake and signed with the first agent who’d take me on. If my experience can teach just one lesson, let it be this: the author-agent relationship is like a marriage. Be just as careful in getting into one as the other.

This author ended up terminating the relationship with her first agent and thankfully signed with another agent more suited later. Congrats. But if you can avoid it, do. Research research research, write, revise, revise.

Make your query count. Your manuscript and your career will thank you.

Write On!