Blake Schwendiman's Blog and Blook

Current conventional wisdom indicates that when a new author is seeking a literary agent (or publisher) that the proper way to make first contact is by sending a query letter. For fiction, a query letter should indicate the genre of the book, a brief description of the book and of the author. I read everything I could find on creating the perfect query letter and gave it a shot. Well, four shots actually.

Here are my four query letters:

• Query Letter 1
• Query Letter 2
• Query Letter 3
  
• Query Letter 4

The first two were ugly and neither one produced any positive response. So, I read everything I could find on design so that at least my letters would look better and I created #3. I never sent that one out because I showed it to some friends whose comments led to #4. I sent query letter #4 to about 50 agents.

All but three of the responses simply said "We already have plenty of work. Thanks, but no thanks." (or something similar). I took that to mean that either they really are too busy or that they hated the letter or the concept and simply weren't interested. That's fine.

Two of the responses were from publishers that aren't what I am looking for. They were POD or vanity and that's just not where I want to go with this book. If I were to choose POD, I would definitely use Lulu again.

One response led to me sending the completed manuscript. I just learned that it was not accepted.

In the middle of all of that, I started this blog. If you haven't yet started, read my book. Each chapter is very small. If you like it, let me know. If you hate it, let me know. If you are the sister-in-law (or any other relationship) to a literary agent, tell them about this site. If you aren't the sister-in-law to a literary agent but you are related to someone, tell them about this site.

As soon as I can get to it, I'll upload some of the response letters to my queries. Some of them are very entertaining.