Query Update

You’ve been itching/chomping at the bit/waiting on pins and needles for the numbers, haven’t you? Well, itch/chomp/wait no longer.

Total queries: 76
Pending queries: 7
Full requests: 4 (1 pending, 1 request for revisions)
Partial requests: 10 (2 pending)
Rejections: 42
Non-responses: 13

Totally psyched about that request for revisions, but since it would involve some pretty serious editing, I’m kind of…thinking right now. Regrouping. Actually, I’m taking some time to think about the entire project (which explains why I’ve only sent out one additional query since my last query update). But as I’ve been thinking, I’ve noticed a few things.

First, I’ve received no more requests since my last query update. Not too unexpected, I guess, especially since I’ve only sent out that one query. But what makes it a little more unexpected is that, between my last two query updates, all I got were requests. No joke. From mid-November to mid-December, I received exactly four query responses, two partial and two full requests, which just goes to show this business can be, and often is, a series of ebbs and flows. But as I mentioned in a previous post, those ebbs and flows have nothing to do with our worth as writers. They just are what they are. And we just are what we are. Surprisingly little correlation.

Second, non-responses and form rejections--the vast majority of those forty-two, by the way--are just a part of querying. It’s nothing personal, and no amount of bellyaching and/or composing vicious rejoinders and then posting them anonymously in that or another agent’s blog comments is likely to change it. Professionalism goes a long way in this and every industry, and in this Google-able world we live in, those sorts of slip-ups will probably come back to bite you. Now you’re all the last people on earth who needed to read that, as you’ve been nothing but cheery and delightful around here, but I just thought I’d mention it, since we can all use reminders.

Well, that’s all I got. Anyone else down in the query trenches with me? How’s it going?