formatting equeries

I'm having a heck of a time with this. I thought what I was sending out looked good, but then I realized two of the three rejections I've gotten were spaced really weirdly when they were bounced back to me. The one request I've gotten looked good.

Either my query has no spaces between paragraphs at all, or it has enormous spaces between them. I've tried sending tests to three different email programs, and they all look different. How are we supposed to make them look good when we're cutting and pasting a document into an email program like Hotmail? It all depends on how the agent's email program displays the text.

Has anyone else had this problem? How do you resolve it? I hate to come off unprofessional, but I can't figure out how to control how the query appears so that it's uniform for everyone.

If an agent likes the premise, will that be enough to encourage them to request my ms? Or will they use the funky formatting as the excuse to reject me?

Thanks in advance for your advice.

I've been sending test queries to Gmail, Hotmail, and my work email address, and they all look different.

Really, the thing I'm struggling with is that (even with wordpad), Hotmail screws up the spaces between paragraphs. Either it takes them out entirely, or it puts about four spaces between each paragraph. Both look ridiculous.

And the same query looks different depending on whether I look at it from my work email or from Hotmail. Maybe I need to drop Hotmail.

Thanks for the feedback.

Hmm, when I replace hard returns with soft returns, there are no spaces at all. All the text is smooshed together. I would like just one line between each paragraph, to break up the text for the eye.

I think I'm going to switch to Gmail. When I send it from there, it looks right. Hotmail always adds weird spacing to my stuff. One of my readers also said it was adding random letters to my text (which didn't show up on my end of things).

This is just too important to screw things up (which it seems I've already done on a number of queries that may look really weird, thanks to Hotmail).

Thanks, caromora. I'll try this.