Hey all,
Forgive the silly subject name, but this is something that's come up in recent history for me. A few months ago, I sent off about 12 query letters. Only like 2 of them responded. The two that responded with form rejections.
I noticed, in the quoted text, that the E-Mail looked like a jigsaw puzzle. It was just filthy. On a hunch, I pasted my query letter and E-mailed myself. It came off looking all right, but when I picked up the E-Mail outside of G-Mail in Outlook, it looked like Doctor Seuss' worst nightmare, with random sentence breaks. It was just an eyesore.
Quite embarrassed, I hung my head in shame.
The impact of that is still with me. I was never quite able to pinpoint the reason that happened, so every time I'm about to send out a query, I always E-Mail it to myself, then pick it up in outlook, then - provided it comes out all right - I wince and submit it to the agent. After the 75th or so time doing that, especially when there's an inexplicable formatting problem and I need to repeat that about 10 times before I get it to actually read like it is when I send it out, it gets very tedious. I kinda just wish I could trust my E-Mail not to put whatever damn formatting it liked.
So, let's just cut right to a basic question: what is your ritual when you E-Mail query letters? What E-Mail platform do you use? How do you avoid any hidden formatting problems that seem to randomly spring up when you cut and paste?
Forgive the silly subject name, but this is something that's come up in recent history for me. A few months ago, I sent off about 12 query letters. Only like 2 of them responded. The two that responded with form rejections.
I noticed, in the quoted text, that the E-Mail looked like a jigsaw puzzle. It was just filthy. On a hunch, I pasted my query letter and E-mailed myself. It came off looking all right, but when I picked up the E-Mail outside of G-Mail in Outlook, it looked like Doctor Seuss' worst nightmare, with random sentence breaks. It was just an eyesore.
Quite embarrassed, I hung my head in shame.
The impact of that is still with me. I was never quite able to pinpoint the reason that happened, so every time I'm about to send out a query, I always E-Mail it to myself, then pick it up in outlook, then - provided it comes out all right - I wince and submit it to the agent. After the 75th or so time doing that, especially when there's an inexplicable formatting problem and I need to repeat that about 10 times before I get it to actually read like it is when I send it out, it gets very tedious. I kinda just wish I could trust my E-Mail not to put whatever damn formatting it liked.
So, let's just cut right to a basic question: what is your ritual when you E-Mail query letters? What E-Mail platform do you use? How do you avoid any hidden formatting problems that seem to randomly spring up when you cut and paste?
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