I sent forty or fifty query letters for 'A Ledge Outside Time'. I got one nibble that quickly turned into a 'no, thanks.' It was the frustration with this journey that finally led me to independently publish. That in itself is a separate blog post or three.
Being a writer, I have a metaphor for everything, and my metaphor for literary agents is as Human Resources Managers. I hired plenty of people throughout my corporate career and so I have plenty of experience working with human resources on such matters.
Imagine a human resources manager that is hiring for a position that has indeterminate pay but loads of psychic satisfaction. Emotional positivity, with an underlying hope that you are the next Stephen King and every time you put pen to paper you make a million bucks. There are plenty of applications for the job; in fact, thousands.
They all mail you their resume. Your inbox is full of resumes for this job. If you are a successful human resources manager you might be trying to fill half a dozen jobs all at the same time, and everyone that wants the job is sending you their resume.
Let's say you get one hundred fifty resumes a day to review. Unfortunately that is not your only job; you have to minister to the people you have already hired, go to meetings, sit with the accountants and perform acts of business math, and a lawyer or two just for variety. So you get four hours a day to look at resumes and you feel obligated to read as many as possible. What are you going to do?
Hard to say speciically; but you will be going through those resumes as fast as is humanly possible, trying to find a few candidates that might be worthy of further consideration. You will probably develop various odd criteria for reducing the pool of candidates. 'From now on, I am not reviewing anyone that mis-spells my first name. If they can't get that right, what else won't they get right?' 'If the first paragraph doesn't grab me, I'm done'. 'If the formatting is wonky I'm hitting delete. I don't have time to decipher.' And etcetera.
Our literary agents are just like this HR manager. They have a lot of inbound traffic and they are looking for a diamond, preferably not in the rough. It's not a non-profit position after all. They are trying to sell books, and if they don't quickly see how whatever you have sent them is going to accomplish that goal, your submission goes by the wayside.
And they are also unfortunately human, which means that if they got a bad nights sleep, or the dog pooped in the living room and they stepped in it on the way to get coffee at seven AM, or they got into an argument with their significant other, or a whole host of other reasons, they are going to be giving less than their one hundred percent all to your submission.
So it's just like getting a job. The resume (query letter) has to hit them right at the right time. If it doesn't you are toast.
It's a wonder anyone gets a job just by sending a resume. In fact, in job-hunting school they will tell you that sending resumes is a low-percentage way to get a job. The better way to get it done is via personal contacts. You have to get an intro to the HR Manager - the Literary Agent - and get with them face-to-face to increase your odds.
And that doesn't mean you show up at their office uninvited with coffee and a donut. Although I guess that might work, if you caught the agent in a caffeine or sugar withdrawal situation. You need an intro, you need to catch them at the right place and time.
So how do you do that? Any ideas?
