At what point do you stop and reassess your query letter? 10 form R's? 20? I had a number of people crit my letter, but since my two R's have been forms with no invitation to send partials or fulls, I am wondering if I am burning my agent bridges with a crap letter.
At what point do you stop and reassess your query?
- Thread starter toomanycarbs
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Other will have different opinions, but I'd definitely tweak if you haven't had any bites after 10.
Two is definitely too soon to worry.
Two is definitely too soon to worry.
Yes, 2 is too soon. If you've done your research and picked the agents you think best fit you're writing, you should be able to tell after 10 or so if your query is enticing enough.
Other will have different opinions, but I'd definitely tweak if you haven't had any bites after 10.
Two is definitely too soon to worry.
Definitely ten.
A good way to work if you're unsure of your query is to query some fast-responding agents that aren't your dream agents. That way you don't strike the chance to query your dream agent/can have a better query for your dream agents if the prior one wasn't working.
This was what I was hoping would happen, that I might get some sort of feedback and improve off of it, but instead the ones who have responded have been form R's. I have only queried 8 or 9 agents so far.
Frankly, if your query needs work, agents aren't going to give you feedback about revising it. They just don't have time for that--it's part of the writer's "job" to learn how to write a good query, a good synopsis, etc., as well as a good manuscript.
An agent who requests a partial or full of your manuscript and then rejects that material might, just might, give you a line of feedback (like "pacing seemed off"), but that's if you've made it past the query stage...and even partials and fulls can sometimes just get a form R.
So you could query 100 agents and still not get feedback on your query if it's a bad query...just a form R.
The good news is that there are lots of other resources, online and off, for query writing!
Have you tried the Query Letter Hell (QLH) thread here at AW? If you have at least 50 posts, you can log into QLH and post your query for feedback from other AWs.
You can also take a look at agent blogs like www.pubrants.blogspot.com and http://jetreidliterary.blogspot.com/ for tips on how to improve your query. Those agent blogs and this link to some posts from former agent Nathan Bransford's blog http://blog.nathanbransford.com/search/label/Anatomy of a Good Query Letter also show off some successful queries to model.
Best of luck!!
An agent who requests a partial or full of your manuscript and then rejects that material might, just might, give you a line of feedback (like "pacing seemed off"), but that's if you've made it past the query stage...and even partials and fulls can sometimes just get a form R.
So you could query 100 agents and still not get feedback on your query if it's a bad query...just a form R.
The good news is that there are lots of other resources, online and off, for query writing!
Have you tried the Query Letter Hell (QLH) thread here at AW? If you have at least 50 posts, you can log into QLH and post your query for feedback from other AWs.
You can also take a look at agent blogs like www.pubrants.blogspot.com and http://jetreidliterary.blogspot.com/ for tips on how to improve your query. Those agent blogs and this link to some posts from former agent Nathan Bransford's blog http://blog.nathanbransford.com/search/label/Anatomy of a Good Query Letter also show off some successful queries to model.
Best of luck!!
Right. qdsb has some great pointers in that regard.
Agents almost never give query feedback, that's what the AW community is for!
Thanks for the response. I do read pubrants and query shark regularly, and have read (not as much of) nathan's as well. I "thought" my query was good, and ran it by some writer friends before submitting, so the form R's have taken me a bit by surprise. I don't know that it's not good, but I guess if it was good enough, I would be getting requests for more (sigh) I tried to get into the QLH forum but it kept asking for my password which I put in about a dozen times and it wouldn't let me access it.
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