Today, several editors and agents are posting their queries in real time. I’ve been following along and while I’ve been highly amused by many of the things these extremely informative people are saying fail, I’m also learning quite a bit about what they look for. Not that it matters to me, since I’m not an aspiring author. But for those of you who are (or who have already been published) you might want to go check it out.
Here’s a list of just a few of the editors and agents playing along:
Agent Colleen Lindsay
Editor Angela James (Samhain Publishing)
Publisher Renee Ting (Shen’s Books)
Agent Lauren MacLeod
Agent Greg Daniel
Agent Kate Schafer Testerman
Agent Matt Wagner
Agency Intern Sarah “JJ” Jae-Jones
You can follow along by doing a search on Twitter for the tag #queryfail, or you can follow along using sites like monittor.com or TweetGrid.com
Some examples:
From Colleen Lindsay:
Four paragraphs about your former career as a technical writer. Not one sentence about plot of book. #queryfail
From Tracy Marchini:
“I hope you don’t mind that I found your personal email address…” #queryfail on multiple levels
From Angela James:
absolutely nothing about the book in the query letter. Nothing. One paragraph, five sentences and I know nothing about the book. #queryfail
read more here.
imagine if you are reading the query fail and one of the queries was yours?
that would make me LOL. A lot.
imagine if you are reading the query fail and one of the queries was yours?
GULP!
Oops! They probably have tons of these, too!
It reminds me of when I was reading through submissions. I used to feel bad rejecting them, but one them made me happy to reject.
the entire thing was written like this no grammar or punctuation at all it was so hard to read