Monday, October 10, 2011

Dreadful Query Etiquette

I'm not a stickler for rules. In fact, I've broken a rule once... or twice, not that I'll ever tell you when, how, or why. My point is that I'm not as strict as some may think, and I am certainly more lax than many of my colleagues when it comes to submission etiquette.

I honestly don't expect much. If you've seen my prior posts on queries, you'll see that there are things that should and should not be included in the letter. When it comes down to it, that's all I ask for.

However, I do have some peeves that should be noted. They are mass mailing and poor formatting. I Don't like the later for the obvious reasons...it's hard to read. When I spend all day in front of a computer or book reading, my little old eyes get tired, and my brain gets saturated, and my patience... goes. I don't like things that look like they've been cut and pasted. I'm bothered when text looks different, or is indented in a way that makes me stop reading to figure out if what I'm about to read is still part of the letter. Make it at least look professional folks. Use your common sense. Please!

The second peeve I mentioned is the mass e-mail. This is actually what prompted me to write this right now. I just received a query from someone with 57 other recipients listed... Yes, FIFTY-SEVEN other agents in the "To:" line. Just to let you all know... This is a No-No. No one likes this. It is just as bad as misspelling someone's name. It shows lack of attention to detail, lack of patience, lack of respect, and, in sum, lack of professionalism. I tried to tell myself that it was fine. After all, I'm a busy person too, and I can understand anyone who is trying to save time...So I read the query.

...And I shouldn't have. I too should have saved the time, because the thing is a mess. In short, the letter contains all the errors that I feared. I've been here before. I've even posted entries in this blog about what not to do on a query, but since this one is a bit different, I decided to tell people about this one too. Hopefully, it will deter others from making the same mistakes.

In case you were wondering... I did respond to the letter. Here's what I said:

Dear John, Thanks for your submission. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to decline this book because I'm honestly not sure what it is about. Your summary includes too many different elements to accurately portray the plot of the story. You need to be more careful with punctuation and formatting. Also, just to let you know, the majority of the agents you sent this to will probably not respond to this e-mail because it is a mass e-mail. You should never include the names of all of the recipients in one e-mail. Hope this is helpful to you in the future.

I could have said more to give him better guidance. I could have referred him to an article, or a book. Then again, I probably should have saved my time and just replied, "DECLINED DUE TO LACK OF COMMON SENSE." Or even better, I should have clicked on "Reply to all" ;)

Okay, thanks for letting me vent. I feel much better. :)

Happy writing!
~Marisa

15 comments:

  1. Man I would love to read that query! Sounds very entertaining.

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  2. One thing that drove me crazy back when I was querying was discovering once or twice that a bit of text looked different from the surrounding text--but not on my email client! Once I addressed the query to my own alternate address instead of to the agent I intended it for because I wanted to make sure the pages-pasted-into-body-of-email looked right. To my horror, I noticed that one particular phrase or whatever came into my G-mail account in a different color from the rest of the text! It was one of those weird glitchy things like MSWord sometimes does, when you right-arrow and your typeface and size suddenly change, but it was invisible in my regular client. I managed to get it fixed, but I wonder how many agents got similarly glitched stuff, despite my best efforts to play by the rules!

    (Not to take away from your larger point--this querier was obviously pretty clueless!)

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  3. I know how time short you are. I think you were very generous with your advice.
    Best
    Cathleen

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  4. I hate the whole query process. I know it's a necessary part of getting published, but trying to describe your book in such a short format is difficult to say the least.

    I have submitted to multiple agents, but I would never do it like you have mentioned.

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  5. Software with a psychotic mind of its own drives this techie to pound his skull on the desk. For all the braying the major software companies do about just how wonderful their babies are, I still have to jump through multiple hoops on fire just to make sure my copy/paste behaves. Word, Open Office, Libre Office, and don't get me started on Gmail's primitive clunkiness ... which I use as an email client but tolerate, now that I've found a convoluted-yet-working trick that involves fetching sent emails and multiple accounts. And that's after elevating my skills to present my communications as professionally as I know how.

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  6. I'm curious. Did this person reply to your response? If so, was it to thank you? Too bad if they didn't.

    *sigh* Queries such as this gives all writers a bad name, the ones who spend hours in research, education, and agony trying to gain the attention of agents. New literary agents quickly lose their enthusiasm for the unpublished and writers become dejected with the automatic rejections by jaded agents.

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  7. Kudos to you for responding to the email. Classy. I would never send a mass email to agents, but not too long ago I discovered to my horror that my pasted-in letter lost all of my paragraph spacings. It looked fine in my gmail send box, but when I received it as a copy in my yahoo personal email, it was wrecked. I fixed it and re-sent. I hope the recipient is as understanding as you were. Incidentally, I queried you (correctly, I hope) and am excited to meet you soon at FWA here in Florida.

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  8. Dear (AGENT):

    I got your name from (The Writer's Market / a conference in Las Vegas / a bathroom wall in Las Vegas). Since you represent (YA / Civil War era biographies / lesbian fiction), you'll definitely want to read my book, (WHICHEVER ONE I FEEL LIKE). I've been told it's a lot like (the Twilight series / "Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter" / the movie "Liquid Sky"). It's complete and is just over (150 / 1,550 / 150,000) words.

    I hope you want to read it (and if you don't you're a loser -- VERY CATHARTIC, BUT DELETE BEFORE SENDING!!).

    Regards,
    Michael

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  9. LOL Michael. Have you ever actually sent an email by mistake, half-done and hardly what you meant to release? Talk about embarrassing.... Apologies to any recipient who ever gets such a thing, agent or otherwise!

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  10. Well look at this! I JUST HAPPEN to have some FREE unsolicited advice on this very subject!

    http://trudydoyle.wordpress.com/2011/04/05/writing-the-dread-query-revisited/

    Don't say you haven't been told!

    Trudy

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  11. Isn't that funny! I JUST SO HAPPEN to have some free unsolicited advice on that very subject:

    http://trudydoyle.wordpress.com/2011/04/05/writing-the-dread-query-revisited/

    Don't say you haven't been told!

    Trudy

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  12. I think it's nice of you to offer that kind of critique so the author will understand what went wrong and why no one is responding.

    On the other hand, that reply all option could have been hilarious. Nice of you to not do that, too.

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  13. Wow, you are so nice to have even responded to his email!

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  14. Hope he doesn't write back with "since you were so nice the first time, could you help me with..."!

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  15. You've got to hope he won't write back with "Since you were so nice the first time, could you help me with..."

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