Query Season is in Full Swing!

It's Query Season!

I'd say so, at least. Eric over at PimpMyNovel is talking about rejection again, and according to query tracker, this is a busy time of year. More people are querying. More people are getting positive responses, as in partial and full requests.

You have only to follow a few literary agents on twitter to see jewels from their slush piles and cryptic, excited messages about the ones they want to represent rather than simply mock. (Though the mocking is hilarious, too.)

So if you've got a project that's ready--really ready--get out there in the open and try to be the biggest target you can be for those agents...but in a good way.

• And don't forget to stop to smell the roses with Natalie Whipple. Agent Elana Roth also talks about why things don't go as fast as we'd like. 

• Join yesterday's twitter discussion on how agents SHOULD be paid still going on at author Victoria Strauss' blog.

• Or follow agent Colleen Lindsay on twitter to take part in today's controversial discussion on author advances, and whether or not they should be eradicated. 

(And yes, I do have queries on the brain. I'm so pathetic, I dreamed of getting a follow-up letter from the agent with my full manuscript, just to let me know she hadn't gotten to it yet. As if agents have time for stuff like that! Silly brain!)

Time for a Serious Post: Slush

Okay, after my epic fangirliness from the past two posts, I think I need to simmer down a bit with a topic of interest to my 17 readers (I love you guys, by the way).

Since we are mostly comprised of writers here, I thought SLUSH would be the perfect topic to bring us back to reality. So here goes...

Slush: an aspiring author's hopes and dreams squeezed into a one-page query letter and dumped into a cyber-stack (sometimes a physical stack, in the case of snail mail) of other aspiring authors' hopes and dreams.

Who reads slush? Depending on the practice of the literary agency or publishing company, your readers will be either interns, agents, or editors.

What are they looking for? Well, after reading several Publishers Marketplace agency summaries, I feel somewhat qualified to answer this (bullet-style, of course):

• Compelling premise
• Tight plot
• Unique/strong voice
• Interesting, well-rounded characters
• Brilliant hook
• Marketability (this isn't usually listed in their literature, but it's a no-brainer)
• No typos, grammatical, spelling, or punctuation problems

Beyond that, there are specific tastes to consider:

• Do they represent children's books or adult novels? Both?
• Do they hate hard science fiction and love paranormal plots? Or do they accept only memoirs?
• Are there formatting considerations? (graphic novels, illustrations, etc.)
• and, perhaps most importantly, what type of query will they accept? Synopsis? First 3-10 pgs?

Before we query, we have to discover all these unique preferences for each and every agent on our WANTED list. Otherwise, we face the risk of an automatic query fail. And nobody wants an automatic fail (take it from somebody who had to take her driver's test three times at age 20).

So the key to breaking out of the slush pile is simple: knowledge.

I said it was simple, but I didn't say it wasn't unendingly difficult, too. Finding all this knowledge, even with the brilliant resources on the web (querytracker.net and agentquery.com, to name two), is extremely time-consuming.

But it is necessary. Besides, as authors, we will have to learn to manage our time to balance writing, editing, promoting, and otherwise living. Might as well start learning that balance now.

There. I promised you a dose of reality and there it is. If you're feeling kind of down, mosey on over to....

SLUSHPILE HELL: a fun little blog making fun of querying writers who we hope aren't us.

Update: Check out Amparo Oritz's 10 Step Program for the Query Wuss for another fun list.