Friday, December 2, 2016

Query Mistake #1 - Breaking the Rules

Every once in a while I get a query where the author brags that he's going to break all the query rules because he's just that brilliant. Many others don't follow normal query procedures without explanation, leaving me to wonder if they are ignorant of them, if they are too lazy to follow them, or if they think they are . . . well, just that brilliant.

None of these is a good sign.

Why is it so important to read from the audition script instead of inventing your own material on the fly? After all, I can easily figure out that something is a query, even if it doesn't have the word "query" in the subject line. It only takes two seconds to open an attachment, whether it was requested or not, and if the query is two or three pages long, or only one sentence, surely this is not a serious impediment to my evaluating it.

From my perspective, I've got to go through a bunch of queries in a short period of time. What I'm trying to do is quickly sort them. I want to immediately discard the ones that aren't in a category I represent, and I want to quickly figure out on the others if the writer has some skill with words, and to figure out if they have any credits I should pay attention to. When that is done, I can then read the remaining queries with greater attention.

To take a small example, what about people who don't put the word "query" in the subject line? I do that for a simple reason. My inbox is crammed full, and I've set up a filter to move all queries to a special folder. When you don't follow this simple procedure, your query might go to spam or might be lost in the flood of other stuff, and at the very least it requires me to manually move your query to the right place.

Even if you don't really believe in standard query format, or thing agents are hidebound for insisting on them, you're trying to show at this early stage that you've done your homework and you are a professional who will be pleasant to work with down the road.

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