Hello, writer,
An awful lot of y'all are querying agents and publishers these days.
More than usual.
I love to see it. You know the odds, but you go for it anyway, because you believe in yourself and in your book. (Hey, so do we!)
Lately I've been getting a lot of emails to the effect of "I queried four agents and didn't hear anything. Does that means my book sucks? Should I give up and self-publish?"
Over the next few weeks, I want to examine this message and approach, breaking it into a series of questions,
answers, and next steps.
Question #1: Is four queries a good number?
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WBN message. I hope you've been well. Do you have any news to catch me up on? Anything fresh and exciting in your writing life? Click "reply" and tell me all about it!)
Answer: Absolutely not. Not even close.
Conventional wisdom says that any given writer has a 1-in-6,000 chance of signing with any given agent he/she queries.
In the face of that, does four strike you as a good number?
Look at it this way: The odds of hitting the Powerball jackpot are 1 in almost 300,000,000. If those odds were 1 in 6,000 instead, would you buy only four tickets?
Maybe that's a shitty analogy. I'm bad at math (and thinking), plus I don't play any lottery.
The point is, four is not enough.
Question #2: So how many should you send?
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Answer: Nothing short of fifty!
I know, fifty query letters seems like a lot. A lot of work, a lot of time, a lot of copy/paste rejections, a lot of ghosting.
It is! It's all of those things. I'm presently querying on behalf of five WBN writers. I know what it's like.
At the same time: This is your book! Think of all the lonely hours and brainspace it's eaten up. Does another forty-six query letters seem unreasonable, a waste of time?
I'm not suggesting that you carpet-bomb. Spend the time it takes to find the right agents, and spend the time it takes to tailor your letter to each one whenever possible.
Only after fifty queries can you make a sincere assessment.
(Ad break no. 3: We have a lovely book-shaped hole in our ghostwriting schedule! If you don't want to write your book yourself and deal with all this stuff I'm yammering about, reply to this email and let's set up a no-pressure/no-strings chat.)
Next week, we'll take a look at how to make that sincere assessment after you send your fifty queries, and what to do
next.
.
