Of those queries, 13 percent were perhaps right for someone else—but not for me or anyone at our company.
30.5 percent were interesting but not quite there yet—with further work, the query and project could be marketable.
And 56.5 percent need to go back to the drawing board.
Some had interesting takes on punctuation:
“if you respect self-promotional maniacs, then you'll understand where i'm coming from n going ;-) ...just google me 4 an example of what i'm willing to do to promote my book. how often do ya find such career dedication? Lol”
Some attempted to use quotes from readers as “proof” that the work was worth reading:
“[[Author] has an interesting and unusual writing style.” --Author’s friend
Some have word counts that are far enough from the norm that I stop reading:
“I have recently completed a 352,000-word novel of literary fiction...”
And, though I’d never reject someone for use of one cliché or for formatting…
Eleven used my least favorite query cliché: “Then [Character]’s world was turned upside down.”
Thirteen of them had obnoxious formatting:
- Bright colors and fonts
- Emoticons :)
- An email forwarded so many times, the line breaks don’t work
- Pictures of how the author imagines the book cover
- Instead of paragraphs, one big block of text
Ten of these queries were only one paragraph long.
Eleven had more than five punctuation errors.
Three compared their works to two or more runaway bestsellers, ie, “This is Harry Potter meets Twilight meets Eat, Pray, Love.”
Which, as you can imagine, did not make them appear particularly well-read.
And six of those CC’d about forty other agents, so I could see what other agents were receiving this--way to make a girl feel special.
Next week on (as I'm calling it) The Pie Chart Show, we'll...actually have pie charts!
I was a little confused about the 'Three compared their works to bestsellers' thing, because Colleen Linday suggested nearly the opposite in her 'High Concept' lecture at DFWW Con. She seemed to think it was a good elevator-pitch style tactic.
ReplyDeleteI suppose it's one of those research-what-the- agent-likes situations.
Although, I can totally see how making such comparisons violates the show great humility rule. And, of course, you might just pick a runaway hit that your prospective agent loathes.
Hi Cinnamon,
ReplyDeleteHere, I meant that these writers compared their works to more than one--which, to me, is a little over-the-top.
I think this depends on the agent--and I do believe there were a lot of agent sick of hearing about books compared to Eat, Pray, Love right after the movie came out!
I'd say it's better to compare your work to a second-tier bestseller--versus the one that becomes nearly a cliché because people mention it so much. In my mind, that makes one look a little more well-read.