I don't have any writing credits!

Unless you have something in your background (workshop, or maybe college classes) I'd suggest avoiding the topic if you lack credits. Just do a professional query telling about your novel. If it's what the agents are looking for, you might hook one.

Don't worry about it. Just write a great query, focusing on your novel.

While you are at this stage, can you write a few short stories and enter them into contests. I don't write short stories by choice but I did write a few and received a 'commended' for one in a contest and had three accepted for anthologies. So, with little effort, I built myself some writing credibility. But I worked on it for that purpose only. You might try it.

The book is what matters most, so don't worry if you don't have credits. Just make the query the best you can and send it out there. Credits don't sway agents that much (unless they're really amazing credits). If the agent is on the fence about the book, and they see you sold a bunch of stories, that might be enough to push them over to take a peek. Because others paid for your writing, the odds are your writing is good. But in the end, the novel still has to stand on its own. And if you show you can write in your query, then you've done what credits would have said anyway.

Mumut said:

While you are at this stage, can you write a few short stories and enter them into contests. I don't write short stories by choice but I did write a few and received a 'commended' for one in a contest and had three accepted for anthologies. So, with little effort, I built myself some writing credibility. But I worked on it for that purpose only. You might try it.

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same here. I wrote two short stories and had them published in literary magazines. It wasn't too difficult. The hardest part was figuring out where to submit them, and duotrope.com solved that problem.

But I agree that the book is what matters most. Lots of first-timers get a novel published without any previous publishing credits.

Late, but I thought I'd add my little somethin'.

I don't have any credits either, and I've had a few partial requests. For my brief author bio, I simple squeezed it into talking about why *I* was the right person to tell this story. It was seriously not serious, and kept with the tone of the query altogether. Since my story takes place near the ocean with certain romance concepts, I simply took the soap box and elaborated I'd grown up at the beach and chased around boys in a diaper.

The only difference I've found is that it may cause an agent to choose viewing a partial instead of a full. But, if you've written a good full, you've written a good partial, so it shouldn't matter in the end!

I guess.