And now, a dispatch from the query wars

[annathepiper]

I have had very little brain for editing old words or writing new ones lately. To make up for this, I've been querying like mad. The problem with sending out a whole swath of queries is, of course, that the chances are very high that you'll get back a whole swath of rejection letters. Often several in the same week, if you're doing e-queries.

Which has led me to conclude that there must surely be a Writer's Law of some sort that says that persons who are not interested in your work will answer much, much more quickly than the ones who have even the remotest glimmer of interest. So far, the fastest turnaround times I've had on queries for Lament of the Dove have been for folks who have politely informed me within twenty-four hours that they are not the right people to represent my work. This week, I've gotten two!

Nevertheless, hope springs eternal, or perhaps in my case, grabs the nearest can of diet Mountain Dew as it struggles to keep itself awake. I've just discovered for myself the wonders of AgentQuery.com, which appears to be a tool even more awesome for writers than the Zokotou word meter. All you already-published and already-agented folks on my Friends list, this is the part where you grin tolerantly and think to yourselves, "A baby novelist! Isn't she cute?" ;) The rest of you, aspiring hopefuls like myself, go. Utilize AgentQuery.com. Search the hell out of it and start picking and choosing the agents who might be right for you.

Meanwhile, I've just tonight composed another query for Faerie Blood to punt it back out the door too. This brings me back up to a total of eight queries out, one for Faerie Blood and seven for Lament. I've just about run out of the agents I'm most interested in who are taking email queries, so I'm going to have to start firing up the paper mail real soon now.

In the meantime, okay, Inbox, I'm waiting. Bring it. I've got more diet Dew.

Comments

[mizkit.livejournal.com]

Aww! A baby novelist! Isn't she cuuuute!

...actually, I'd never heard of AgentQuery until you mentioned it the other day. :) It sounds like a good resource. :)

[angharads-house.livejournal.com]

Oh, my, a Net tool for agent selection. ^_^

Days are, I wish that the Nets had existed in this way when I was starting out in the (when was it? ummm...) Late Jurassic era.

And on the "oh, look, a baby novelist!" tack, it's actually good to see people coming along, just as I am getting a lot of benefit from following along with other friends, like M., who are planning for end-of-career issues.

Good fortune to thee, as ever!

[annathepiper]

No worries; Queen of Souls has already had four sets of eyes on it, so the first draft's been pretty well beta-read at this point and I REALLY need to get off the dime and start editing it. :) But I appreciate you checking in! Keep watching this space, there will certainly be eventual other beta reading opportunities if you want another shot at some point.

Sympathies about the Office woes, too!

[annathepiper]

Hee!

So far I've found a bunch of people I'd already heard of but several others I hadn't. I'll definitely be utilizing this regularly, especially once I make with the paper mail queries. :)

[annathepiper]

Thank you very much. :)

Yeah, I'm thrilled to have found agentquery.com. On a related note there's apparently also querytracker.net, which I haven't actually checked out yet but which I've seen mentioned around. I haven't bothered to utilize it since I'm perfectly happy with the spreadsheet I've been using to track my queries. But I'm very happy it's out there nonetheless!

[angharads-house.livejournal.com]

Good morning to thee!

And on a note of cautious demurral.....

.... perhaps this speaks more to my general concern for security issues, but I always wonder, with things like agentquery.com and querytracker.net, just what their business model is, and whether there are any resultant risks to my security or privacy -- and of course there's the added consideration of psuedonymy for this here writer.

It looks like I will have some rest and recuperation downtime this summer (I've earned it, ach ja in spades I have), and may have time to read/comment on your work if you'd like.

And while the line's open, I might add that the very best advice I ever received about the business of writing was from Lt.Cmdr. L. S. de Camp, perhaps better known as writer L. Sprague de Camp (who gave a workshop that I attended lo these many years ago): he said "keep a master tracking file for every single thing you write; give it an opus number, and keep those files up to date". He had a very solid partnership with his wife, Catherine, who took on many of the needful managerial tasks so that he could focus on writing. The two de Camps wrote a very useful guidebook for writers: Science Fiction Handbook (1975 revised edition); am sorry to confess that while sitting here at my desk at the mining office I cannot recall the publisher.

Forgive my verbosity this early in a morning: must be the lime juice I tried in my morning coffee (adds an interesting kick to it).

Angharad
survivor of the publishing maze

p.s. to this: wherever do your lovely scuzzbopping icons come from? I love the one with pages flying out the window!

[annathepiper]

Well, the way agentquery.com works is that you don't have to log in or register or anything; it's simply a specialized search engine. They apparently function by way of sponsors. If you like the site and find it valuable, they encourage you to donate to their sponsors.

Privacy-wise, I would therefore assume that the main issue there would be how worried one is about the usual sorts of data that get recorded in web server logs getting misused. Since there's nothing on the site that asks you to enter personal information, that strikes me as the only way they might figure out which visitor is which.

I don't know yet how querytracker.net functions; I haven't checked it out. It's less useful to me since I do already keep an Excel spreadsheet to track my query history, and that's working fine for me. I haven't felt compelled to use an online site to do this for me. I may explore the site at some point anyway just to see if it can convince me otherwise, and/or whether I can get enough of a feel for it that I can at least describe it intelligently to others. :)

Meanwhile, thank you very much for the offer of reading. I'm not in immediate need, though. We'll see how the rest of the summer plays out with this.

Re: Mr. de Camp, heh, it sounds like my little Excel spreadsheet is at least in the same ballpark as what he talks about.

And the Scuzzbopper icons were made for me by Dara, straight from screencaps off one of our copies of Twice Upon a Time. I <3 Scuzzbopper. :)