Today's lesson: Write your own query letters

[annathepiper]

Recently I've seen a rash of blog posts from various agents talking about a flood of pretty much identical query letters hitting their agencies. These letters all seem to follow the same template, come across as overly familiar, and completely ignore the golden rule that if an author wants to query an agent, she should damn well read that agent's webpage or do appropriate other research to find out how an agent wishes to receive submissions. I've seen quite a bit of speculation about whether the letters come out of a query-letter-generating script of some sort, or whether someone has set up a "service" that offers to bombard agents all over the place with the same form letter about your novel.

But regardless of how the letters are getting generated, they are getting universally panned as Bad Ideas. Long story short: write your own query letter. It's difficult, it's annoying, but in the long run, it's just wiser.

Kristen Nelson rants about it here, agentobscura here, and the redoubtable miss_snark here.

(x-posted between my journal and scuzzboppers)

Comments

[wildshadowstar.livejournal.com]

Also, by writing your own query letter, you're more likely to get noticed than if you'd written a formlike query letter.

[annathepiper]

Yes. From what I've been able to learn about it all so far a decent query letter's general structure is going to follow the same overall format all the time anyway. The really tough part of it is going to be pitching the actual book--and that's the part that needs the personal touch the most.