After locking myself away, secluded from society like the pictured monk, cold querying the entire state of New York and half the Atlantic Seaboard to find an agent to represent my medical thriller, I wondered how much trouble other writers had cold querying agents.Then, like a streak of light, this was an interesting post that came across on the PubRants blog, which I found from the Guide to Literary Agents blog.
Guest blogger Megan Crewe, writing on agent Kristin Nelson's site, explains how she polled 270 successful fiction authors and asked them if they broke in with a referral (a personal connection with someone in the business) or whether they cold queried an agent with success.
The results came back and 62% of the authors got their agent with just a cold query. Pretty amazing - but more than that: encouraging! As agent Dan Lazar once saying that "A good query trumps all else - every time."
Don't know how good my query was, but I did get several requests to read the novel or for partials before I settled on the Bob DiForio Agency.
Now keep your fingers crossed on that sale!
So take hope!
2 comments:
I've not been brave enough so far. But I'm just coming to end of 2nd re-write of my novel and I'm determined I'm going to do something with it this time - and lots of cold querys!
Thanks for the post and encouragement and best wishes with your writing.
I'm amazed the cold queries came in at 62%. That seems high considering all the rejections we hear about from frustrated authors.
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