Cold Querying Still Works

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!

What Agents Hate to See in the Slush Pile

I found this interesting article on the Guide to Literary Agents blog, an excellent writing resource, and one of the few blogs that I subscribe to. The topic was Agents and the Slushpile: Ten Reasons they Stop Reading, and I thought I'd share it with you.

Here are the top 10:

10. Overdone description that doesn’t move the story forward
9. Spoon-feeding the reader what the character is thinking
8. Having the characters address each other repeatedly by name, as in, “John, let’s go!”
7. Introducing a character with first and last name, as in, “John Smith entered the room.”
6. Beginning a story with dialogue
5. Opening with a cliché
4. Yanking the reader out of the action with backstory
3. Not giving the reader a sense of place or where the story is going
2. Characters are MIA until bottom of page 2
1. Telling instead of showing

Lots of these are items we've discussed in our Ten -Point Revision Strategy. Lots of great points we need to keep our eyes on.

An incredibly short post today, but an important one, one that I'm trying to integrate into my head, heart and soul. It's all based around a quote I heard recently, don't recall where. As I was going back to make a few changes to my opening chapter, searching to find the key sentences to make that chapter come alive, the quote jumped back into my head, and somehow, it all made sense.

Now I won't say that this simple quote solved all my problems with the chapter, but I do think it helped me to focus and what may have been missing.

Here's the quote:

Live Your Life Out Loud.

You may have seen this one before. I certainly won't claim credit for it. People use it refer to everything from creating the life you want to getting tattoos and nose piercings.

But for writing, it suddenly resonated with me. Don't be timid. Don't be afraid. Be big and bold and out there. Create big scenes and big characters and big situations. Not bombastic, but not withheld. Let go of the inner critic and just write. Or perhaps . . .

Write Your Novel Out Loud.

Don't be afraid. Just do it.

Hmmmm, words for thought. Time to get back to writing. Please send me your thoughts on this.

More Editing Tips - Writer's Common Mistakes

I found this article at On Writing, and felt it was very well done. Another nice set of tips to add to the Ten Point Revision Strategy.

More Common Mistakes Writer's Make. I'm guilty of quite a few of these myself.

1) Spelling. We all rely too much on the spell checker. Nothing cries out amateur more than gross misspellings in a submission. The spell checker only finds words that are misspelled from its vocabulary, which may have no relation to how they're used in your sentence. The misuse of there/their and they're is a great example. One I make too often.

2) Grammar. It's important to maintain consistency in your use of grammar. I tend to write with quite a few sentence fragments, which is my style. Others right with run-on sentences as a style. Neither is good or bad, just be aware of grammar rules. Break them only when you know them. The On Writing article stresses maintenance of tense also. Can't argue with that.

3) Homophones and similar looking words. Another item that your spell checker won't pick up. Pour or pore. You have to know which is which.

4) Punctuation. Not my forte, but always try to use the proper punctuation, proper use of commas, colons, semi's, etc. I've probably broken the rules ten times in this post alone.

5) Maintenance of Point of View. Old rules are changing. You can shift from one point of view to another in the same chapter now. Even in the same paragraph. But you must do it clearly and elegantly.


I'll keep my eye out for these errors as I'm finishing this final read.

More soon.