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Images/Pics in queries?
- Thread starter chracatoa
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Oh god, me too. I hate it when I click on a link to a news story, and it's a video with no text to read. Videos have to be watched from beginning to end, and it's hard to skim them quickly until you get to the part you're most interested in. If I know something is a video in advance, that's different. Sometimes a video is the best media, but a lot of the time it's faster and easier to read (or skim) an article.
I also hate sites where the video starts playing immediately (and with sound) without my clicking on it to fire it up. If a site has loud music or a video that turns on by itself, it's pretty much guaranteed I'll close it immediately. I don't open attachments to my e-mail ever unless they're from a person I trust and the attachment is requested or something that I know in advance needs to be in that format.
As others have said here, literary agents have the instructions they do for a reason. I can't speak for how they all feel, but in my own job one of the daily irritants would be people who don't follow directions when they submit assignments or whatever. It makes my job a little bit harder, and since there's a finite amount of time for me to do it, well...
The thing is (unlike a teacher), the agents one submits material to have no relationship with you yet. If a submission doesn't fit their required format they have many reasons to delete it unread and very little reason to grit their teeth and read through the materials anyway (the way I have to with my students). Any attempt to bypass their instructions in order to "get a foot in the door" will likely be counterproductive.
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Whew. Thought I was losing my touch there for a minute.
My love, you will never lose your touch. Not with me. *blows kisses*
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If you use Chrome, there's a browser extension called 'Disable HTML5 Autoplay' that works well. You can still play videos and such if you want, you just have to actually click play on them, but it stops the autoplay on most sites. I can go to CNN again, heh.
Because so many people DESPISE fucking autoplay, browsers are working on blocking it automatically, and the extension is so popular that there are some ads with workarounds now, but it kills most stuff off.
We are not talking in general. We are talking about one particular case - getting an agent. And for that particular case, your examples don't work, the situations are different.
Imagine you are trying to get a job. The job requires you to have a particular skill, let's say it's a job requiring you to speak German. So you send them your CV, including a picture of a cute German shepherd puppy. What do you think would get you the job - the picture of a puppy or your ability to speak German? Even if it's a very cute picture of a puppy, the person who'll read your CV will not care one little bit about it. They don't want to make friends, they don't want to talk about puppies. They have 100 other CVs to see today. They don't have time to waste. They want to hire people for the job and will be looking only for people who can speak German well, nothing else matters. Your picture would be seen as a waste of their time. They just won't care about it. They also want a person who is completely focused on the job, not one who is constantly distracted by pictures of puppies, or one who insists on showing pictures of puppies around instead of doing their job.
Before I researched all the ins and outs of getting an agent, (and this was back in the days of snail mail, never e-mail), I was going to send the agent a little teddy bear with my query, since my ms is about stuffed animals. I found out a lead balloon would go over better.
Then I was going to show a picture of the protag, (since he is my teddy bear.)
And then I actually researched to learn what I should and shouldn't do.
I'm not just past no added "marketing." I've read enough to know that's not marketing. It's a way of notifying the agent "here's another loon for the spam pile."
Suggestion: Learn how to query and you will see, thousands of times, why your idea is neither new nor good. It really does cut out a lot of time spent "but, but, but."
And this from someone very good at "but, but, but."
Not to pile on, but here's my take: To someone who is looking to evaluate your writing ability, and decide if it's marketable, everything else is a distraction. You could have designed the world's most gorgeous, award-worthy cover, and the agent's eyes will screen it out and go straight to what matters: the text. Anyway, that has been my experience when evaluating candidates for reporting jobs: I learned not to see things such as resume design, because they have zero correlation with writing strength.
It's entirely different from browsing on Twitter or in a bookstore, where you might indeed go for whatever is visually pleasing because you are NOT actively screening it out as irrelevant data.
It's entirely different from browsing on Twitter or in a bookstore, where you might indeed go for whatever is visually pleasing because you are NOT actively screening it out as irrelevant data.
Going outside the box, doing the unexpected, catching attention can pay off!
But not in this case. You have to consider who you are presenting yourself to. A slick brochure, a wicked nice cover, sure, those look good, but ultimately, good marketing (and as mentioned above, a lot of attempts of this are well, not) puts the cart before the horse. You're trying to convince an agent that your writing is worth representing, and you're going to get a lot farther with that by presenting them with good writing.
But not in this case. You have to consider who you are presenting yourself to. A slick brochure, a wicked nice cover, sure, those look good, but ultimately, good marketing (and as mentioned above, a lot of attempts of this are well, not) puts the cart before the horse. You're trying to convince an agent that your writing is worth representing, and you're going to get a lot farther with that by presenting them with good writing.
I'm glad that agents don't sign writers according to who sends them the most stuff or want extraneous stuff added to queries, like photo covers, gifts, etc. If they did, that type of system would unfairly exclude writers who couldn't afford to spend money to bribe them with gifts.
I'm not an agent either but it seems like everyone is spot on - to not include pictures in queries unless they are specifically asked for.