Abysmal Issues with Copy and Paste in eQueries

Spiny Norman · Oct 5, 2007

So, in keeping with the times, I've begun using equeries as a staple in querying along with the usual snail mail. Naturally, there are difficulties.

I realized pretty quick that if I copied and pasted my query from Office 2007 that it would look sort of odd... namely, it would keep all the text, but then space out the paragraphs very, very far when I sent them out. This was discouraging, but I did get responses. I decided to switch to something more text-based, so I copied my query and began saving it in notepad.

That's what I've been doing for a while. However, I've logged on today and checked my sent email in gmail... And things do not look good. In fact, they look bad. They sure don't look like they did last night, when I sent them.

They look like this:

It's quite a pleasure to write to you, Between the Bridge and the River was one of my favorite discoveries and is now a habitual Christmas and birthday

gift for me. I thought you may be interested in my 86,000 word literary novel, ROUSTABOUT, as it's similar to Mr. Ferguson's book both in humor and its

accessible and eccentric philosophical reflections.

As a burned-out child prodigy, Phineas "Finny" Gable always had a talent for solving puzzles. But when he gets invited to a wedding

in his hometown of Austin and begins seeing visions of his deceased, estranged father, even he can't explain what's going on. In an

attempt to regain what's left of his sanity, Finny returns home for the first time in a decade and embarks on a bizarre spiritual

odyssey to understand his father and his difficult childhood.

But home has become almost as crazy as Finny. His old friends are running around with shady lawyers, stolen merchandise, and

deranged foreign exchange students, and the bride and groom make it abundantly clear that they never expected or even wanted Finny

to come at all. Finny soon finds himself struggling to fix everyone else's lives as well has his own, and he's forced to discover

that the truth, much like life, is often baffling and rarely easy.

ROUSTABOUT is my first novel. I've lived in the Austin area for six years and am familiar with the eccentric places featured in the

story. I'm prepared to send you a partial or the entire manuscript. Thank you for your consideration, and I look forward to hearing

from you.

This is not at all how I formatted it. What happened? I had no idea. I mean, it's clear the paragraphs didn't line up with how my "compose message box" was previously... But the weird thing is that this worked before.

Whatever went wrong, I have no intention of doing that again.

So now I have to wonder. Does a formatting error like this immediately discount me? I'm inclined to think so. Clearly if an author can't even send a simple query then they also can't write... Or so I believe.

What do I do? I guess next month I can just requery them... Maybe by snail mail.

The most irritating thing was that I've been on exclusive for the last month and this was supposed to be my big return to querying. This was suppose to be my week. I sent out a dozen of these damn things.

Ugh. This is so incredibly discouraging. Self-loathing is pouring out of my ears, some of my favorite agents were in that list. Technology is as terrible as it is useful.

MidnightMuse · Oct 5, 2007

Most of us are used to seeing odd formatting come through in our emails - yes? I'd give (at least most) agents the same benefit of the doubt. But what I do, since you're right - cut and paste can really muck you up - is flat-out type the query each time I want to send it.

I avoid copy/paste whenever possible. If, however, you're e-sending five pages or so, you can copy/paste, email it to yourself, open that up, edit it . . you see where I'm going? Pain in the tuckus. Easier to just retype in original email body.

Snail is always going to be prettier, and the only way you can (almost) be sure you'll get a response - SASE. But equeries are quick, easy, not always great and often never replied to. Personally, I only equery those very few agents who say they prefer that over snail.

That's just me.

blacbird · Oct 5, 2007

MidnightMuse said:
Snail is always going to be prettier, and the only way you can (almost) be sure you'll get a response - SASE.

Yeah. You just keep thinking that, Midnight.

caw

Spiny Norman · Oct 5, 2007

That's what I do. I copy, paste, then edit it appropriately so that it looks nice. I'm pretty neurotic about it, this is just an excuse to be even moreso.

I guess what happened is that there are returns and indents at the end of each line, rather than just being forced down by the restrictions of whatever email client you're using.

Christ.

Judg · Oct 5, 2007

Try using the Word Wrap feature in Note Pad. That should end the problem. But do a test run to your gmail address first.

Either that or size down your Note Pad window to the width of an email. NotePad was inserting line breaks at the end of each line on the screen, which is what caused your problem.

Spiny Norman · Oct 5, 2007

Judg said:
Try using the Word Wrap feature in Note Pad. That should end the problem. But do a test run to your gmail address first.

Either that or size down your Note Pad window to the width of an email. NotePad was inserting line breaks at the end of each line on the screen, which is what caused your problem.

Yeah, that's what I figured. It's still weird that it worked before.

...maybe I was editing it then, though, and forgot...

So is there no recovering this? Just wait a while, then requery?

PeeDee · Oct 5, 2007

I like writing in Word 2007, but god....some days...it just makes me want to throw it out the window and buy a typewriter again.

Jamesaritchie · Oct 5, 2007

Queries

I use Gmail, but I use it through Ms Outlook. One big advantage to this is that I never have to cut and paste anything from Word. Anything I write in Word can be e-mailed directly through Word simply by clicking on File/Send to/Mail recipient in Word itself. It can be sent as an attachment, or simply as in-body text with a couple of mouse clicks, and all formatting is preserved perfectly.

PeeDee · Oct 5, 2007

Jamesaritchie said:
I use Gmail, but I use it through Ms Outlook. One big advantage to this is that I never have to cut and paste anything from Word. Anything I write in Word can be e-mailed directly through Word simply by clicking on File/Send to/Mail recipient in Word itself. It can be sent as an attachment, or simply as in-body text with a couple of mouse clicks, and all formatting is preserved perfectly.

...I didn't know you could use G-mail through Microsoft Outlook. I just use my happy G-mail window. That's interesting.

benbradley · Oct 5, 2007

This copy-and-paste thing is uber-frustrating, because "these things are supposed to work" but obviously they don't always work right. You might try "save as..." and choose text and/or a .txt file as the type, and then open the .txt file in wordpad or writepad or something, THEN copy and paste into your email program - this might "fix" things. You might even find it's easier to use one of those programs from the start than using Office 2007 for a comparatively small writing task.

Here are a couple of threads where I've pasted, er, posted on related issues:
http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=78675
http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=65220

David I · Oct 5, 2007

I don't trust e-mail for queries because you have so little control. The way the words look on the page are very important to me. Even brilliant writing looks no better than so-so splattered all over the page, and it's hard for me to correct for that impression. Perhaps some people are more accepting than I.

I've also heard a couple of agents say that the great thing about e-queries is that you can reject dozens of them in five minutes. I never used e-queries unless the agent indicated they strongly preferred it.

Miss Snark had a great deal to say on this topic is you go search through the Snarkives...

avid-dreamer · Oct 5, 2007

HEYYY!!!

Spiny Norman said:
So, in keeping with the times, I've begun using equeries as a staple in querying along with the usual snail mail. Naturally, there are difficulties.

I realized pretty quick that if I copied and pasted my query from Office 2007 that it would look sort of odd... namely, it would keep all the text, but then space out the paragraphs very, very far when I sent them out. This was discouraging, but I did get responses. I decided to switch to something more text-based, so I copied my query and began saving it in notepad.

That's what I've been doing for a while. However, I've logged on today and checked my sent email in gmail... And things do not look good. In fact, they look bad. They sure don't look like they did last night, when I sent them.

They look like this:

This is not at all how I formatted it. What happened? I had no idea. I mean, it's clear the paragraphs didn't line up with how my "compose message box" was previously... But the weird thing is that this worked before.

Whatever went wrong, I have no intention of doing that again.

So now I have to wonder. Does a formatting error like this immediately discount me? I'm inclined to think so. Clearly if an author can't even send a simple query then they also can't write... Or so I believe.

What do I do? I guess next month I can just requery them... Maybe by snail mail.

The most irritating thing was that I've been on exclusive for the last month and this was supposed to be my big return to querying. This was suppose to be my week. I sent out a dozen of these damn things.

Ugh. This is so incredibly discouraging. Self-loathing is pouring out of my ears, some of my favorite agents were in that list. Technology is as terrible as it is useful.

THAT WOULD HAPPEN TO ME TOO!!! I would send this perfect query off to an agent then check the "sent" section of my email and it would be all JACKED UP!!! There would be odd spaces and even some strange, freaking alien-looking symbols throughout the thing. NO WONDER I WAS GETTING SO MANY REJECTIONS!!
I learned to send the mail to myself first to assess it...and when it continued with the the whole "crop circle" #$%@, I stopped sending mail via Yahoo and tried a paid account - which I am sad to mention, was behaving freaky too. I finally tried HOTMAIL and got some satisfaction. I still use it today.

JoniBGoode · Oct 5, 2007

Different email programs display the same message differently. You might type a line that's 100 characters, but when it's read by a program with 65 characters per line, there will be a line break at 65 characters and another line break at 100 characters. That's why you get the short, "ugly" lines on the page.

When you're writing autoresponders for marketing, they teach you to make each line no more than 59 characters long, because that's where the email programs with the shortest lines will cut it off. (You can set your margins in Microsoft word to do this.)

Then you won't get the weird line spacing that you're seeing.

Joni

Carrie R. · Oct 5, 2007

Let me preface that I'm not a techie and really don't know much but... I think that if you cut and paste from Word into Notepad that it retains some of the weird Word funkiness (all those strange commands in the background). I noticed this when I was trying to write a basic webpage -- I wrote it in word and pasted into Notepad and tried to put it up on the web and there was tons of gibberish. You just have to start fresh and type straight into a new notepad document if that's the way you want to go (you can also cut and paste that into word if you want to use spell-check, etc).

When I e-queried I wrote everything in word, saved down to .txt, closed the .txt document and then re-opened the .txt document to make sure the formatting changed. Then I cut and paste from that to gmail. I never had any problems -- no weird symbols or formatting.

wayndom · Oct 5, 2007

David I said:
I've also heard a couple of agents say that the great thing about e-queries is that you can reject dozens of them in five minutes. I never used e-queries unless the agent indicated they strongly preferred it.

This brings up an important point: that queries, like resumes, are primarily used (by the receiver) to eliminate applicants.

Think about it. You're an employer or agent. In either case, you have a huge pile of resumes or query letters on your desk. The first thing you have to do, long before considering any one of them, is make the pile smaller.

I'd never heard the remark about emailed queries, but I don't doubt its accuracy for a nanosecond. When it comes to queries, I'll stick with Crane's 100% cotton rag (at $.28 a page).

J. R. Tomlin · Oct 5, 2007

MidnightMuse said:
Personally, I only equery those very few agents who say they prefer that over snail.

That's just me.

The very few? I see a lot of agents who say they prefer email. Maybe it's because I look for them since I hate snail mail with a passion, or maybe it's that agents that handle spec fiction are more tech oriented. I'm not sure. But I would say it isn't that few.

Maybe it's because I'm so used to using email, but I never seem to have formatting problems. I go through and replace the Word formatting with the formatting I want (not hard if you know the code) and it copies and pastes fine.

As far as being easier to dispose of, most agents are perfectly capable of crumpling a query and tossing it at the circular file, so I doubt it makes any difference.

David I said:
I don't trust e-mail for queries because you have so little control.

You're kidding, right? You have control with the US mail? You drop it in the blue box and never have a clue if it is received or not. Of course, you can put in a card to be returned that they might or might not bother to drop back in the mail to you and that you might or might not receive through the same totally reliable mail service weeks later. I'll take an auto-responder any day of the week.

Prawn · Oct 6, 2007

I prepared a copy of my query that I kept in a different file. I learned to use thinks like a like ---------- with spaces in front of it instead of a centered # for section breaks, because the centering gets taken away. Always use the same e-mail program IN THE SAME BROWSER because different programs and different browsers will screw your formatting up in different ways.

Send it to yourself five or six times, fixing issues each time until it looks okay.

Then make a file of that version and use that when you are doing e-mail queries.

Julie Worth · Oct 6, 2007

Prawn said:
I prepared a copy of my query that I kept in a different file. I learned to use thinks like a like ---------- with spaces in front of it instead of a centered # for section breaks, because the centering gets taken away.

Not if you email it directly from Word, as JAR suggested above. I do this, and by the responses I've received, where the agent included the original text of my query, about 90% of agents are getting the formatting perfectly preserved.

Jamesaritchie · Oct 6, 2007

Formatting

Sending the e-mail to yourself really tells you nothing except whether your own e-mail program screws up the formatting.

Like most of the world, agents and editors usually use Outlook and Word, and whatever evil Bill Gates has done, Outlook and Word are perfect business tools. When used properly, both preserve formatting, and are the same programs the agent or editor will probably be using.

Writing is a business, and it just makes sense to use business tools when communicating with agents and editors.

Cut and paste is great thing, but it's best use is within a manuscript, or when dealing with forms where format isn't an issue.

Though I will admit that Gmail itself seems to do a good job of preserving format, at least when using RTF.

It just doesn't seem very wise to use freeware or other cheap tools when sending business mail.

Abysmal Issues with Copy and Paste in eQueries

Spiny Norman

MidnightMuse

Midnight Reading

blacbird

Spiny Norman

Judg

DISENCHANTED coming soon

Spiny Norman

PeeDee

Where's my tea, please...?

Jamesaritchie

PeeDee

Where's my tea, please...?

benbradley

It's a doggy dog world

David I

avid-dreamer

AW Addict

JoniBGoode

Carrie R.

Procrastinating, clearly

wayndom

J. R. Tomlin

Prawn

Writing is finite,revising infinite

Julie Worth

What? I have a title?

Jamesaritchie