Pencilone said:
I'm starting to believe that there are about 2 main types of agents:
1. The type that want to be told how wonderful they are, how successful they've been to have such and such authors, and how your book is so much like what they have already sold, etc. ,etc.
2. The type that are honestly looking out for a good story to sell and would consider the "how wonderful you are" stuff just some "fluff" not good enough to get under their skin. This is the type that don't expect You to do their work for them.
I really hope to aim at type 2.
But then I might just be an incurable idealist...
No good agent falls into the type one you list, and no smart writer would ever put anything like this into a query. A writer who puts one word of fluff in a query letter, or writes one sentence telling the agent how wonderful she is, deserves to be rejected, and almost certainly will be.
No agent alive can tell how well you write, or how good a story you have, based on a query letter. If they could, they would only ask to see manuscripts that would sell quickly to the first publisher who saw them. They'd never ask to see a manuscript with bad writing and poor story.
If agents always asked to see manuscripts because the query letter contained what might be a good plot, they'd soon need a warehouse to hold all the manuscripts, and they'd never be able to read a fraction of them.
But what any good agent can tell from a query is whether or not you've done your job. No agent expects you to do their work for them, but they do expect you to do your own work for yourself, and part of that work involves not wasting an agent's time. Or your own.
Every good agent out there is looking for a good story to sell. But every agent out there also has different tastes in fiction. Just because you find ten agents who all sell traditional mysteries in no way means all ten of these agents will like the same kind of traditional mystery written in the same style.
Your job is to show that agent you've done your homework and know the sort of story and the kind of voice she likes. If you don't, she knows the odds are at least ten to one that she won't like the novel you send her, which means asking for it is a complete waste of her time and yours.
I sometimes think writers forget how many thousands of other writers are all after the same agent, and that reading manuscripts is something most agents can only devote a relatively few hours to each week. No good agent can ask for more than a tiny fraction of the manuscripts she's queried about because there's only time enough in the world to read a few of them.
So you have to do your job and give that agent a reason to request your manuscript, and a few lines of synopsis in a query letter that tell her nothing about how well you actually write fiction, or how well you can actually tell a story, is not going to get the job done very often.
This is also why credits are important. If you want to sell a mystery, and the first sentence of your query letter says you've sold short stories to Ellery Queen or Alfred Hitchcock, the editor now knows you can actually write fiction well enough to be paid for it.
And if you actually do your job and read some of the novels the agent has previously sold, the agent now knows you understand exactly what kind of fiction she wants, and the style and voice and particular type of story she believes is good.
No good agent expects the writer to do the agent's job. And no smart writer expects an agent to do the writer's job.
Seriously, if an agent asked for every manuscript that sounded like a good story based on the brief synopsis in the query letter, she'd have to hire a hundred readers just to stay even. You have to give her something to work with, something that separates you from the five hundred other writers she'll hear from at the same time. At most, she'll have time to ask for no more than a couple of dozen manuscripts, if that, from that entire batch of five hundred writers, so you have to give her something, you have to stand out. And that something isn't the synopsis part of your query letter that will sound no better and no worse than at least half the other five hundred writers.