Friday, July 23, 2010
Some Query Stats
When I first started with AA, I requested a lot more than I did today. Why? Because I was paying more attention to the concept and a person's credentials than I was the writing. I was willing to over look typos and an awkward sentence or three if the idea was intriguing. I was even willing to request a partial for something with an unusually high word count, though when it comes to queries unusually high isn't really saying much. (I had a 295k query today. No joke.) I have learned my lesson, and will more than likely keep learning as I go.
So, since I'm incredibly late today and you guys seemed to like hearing about queries, I'll share a few stats.
Days worth of submissions: 3
# of queries received: 101
# that weren't actually queries: 5 (I think)
# of queries I wanted to request partials for: 2
*Note - Both books have publisher interest. This isn't what made me want to see more, but it certainly helped.
Total number of queries I sent Awesome Agent to look at: 6
*For the other 4 not previously mentioned:
1 - Author is published and already has an agent but needs another because current agent does not rep genre/age group of their newest book.
1 - Author has a friend at Scholastic who suggested the author query AA.
2 - Authors have multiple books published already; one had a lot more than the other as well.
I'm not even going to go into how many were for genres AA doesn't even rep, but for the record there were quite a few.
So there you have it. Oh, and by the way, I read all of those today in about 2 hours, but I also had to stop and write a little bit about each requested query in an email for Awesome Agent. And my mom kept talking to me while I was reading so that didn't speed things along. My point being I spent about 1 min/query, sometimes more, sometimes less.
Your goal as a writer is to engage me as a reader and make me want to read your query and then ask for more. So to help with that, I'll be working on a list of things not to do in queries to go along with yesterday's post on what you should do. It may be a bit before I get it up since I've got a few partials and a full to read this weekend along with a published book and some editing I'd like to do on my own book.
Have a good weekend!
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7 comments:
I hear you on being busy. I've been commenting less, and I think the blogging might have to be cut back as well.
I think these will help all of us hopeful writers out and I can't wait till your an agent so then I can call you and bother you every day as *my* agent.
It's interesting to hear that some previously published authors are querying agents. I always wondered how that worked, Amanda. Wouldn't they already have agents? Or, if not, why, and would that be a red flag at all for a prospective client? (Maybe they're difficult to work with, for example?)
It's so nice to hear about the query situations. It's interesting how many people don't do any research - you HAVE to know what the agent represents before you query. That stuff would drive me nuts!
Thanks for the great advice - I'll make sure I'm all learned up on how to professionally query before sending work out into the world.
:-)
I can't even imagine going through all those queries. It must be daunting.
Blogging breaks are good for you. I need them every month or two so I can get my focus back on writing.
Thanks for a very interesting post!
295K? That's impressive. I can't imagine reading something that long, let alone writing it. :)
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