Friday, June 19, 2015

Endings, Beginnings, and Nerves



Endings

Everyone knows the end of Jesus’ story. I’ve decided to stop The Point of the Gospel. I haven’t done the work to bring the blog to a wider audience, so I doubt it will be a disappointment to anyone. I'll continue to write about subjects that interest me, and this summer while I slog through the long process of querying agents, I hope to start the networking with other writers and groups that may spur more traffic to the blog.

Escalating Nerves

I sent out the first batch of queries for my manuscript four weeks ago. Haven’t heard anything yet, which is making me really nervous. A number of people in my writers’ group never received a part of my novel I e-mailed to them, pasted into the e-mail that I was to read at our next meeting.  I worry now that agents I queried may not have received my material either.

Agents won’t accept attachments, so you have to paste the number of pages they want of your manuscript into the query e-mail. I have no way to know if they received it, and the majority ask you not to contact them again if you don’t hear from them, since they haven’t the time to respond to every query sent.

What to Do?

I’m left in a quandary. Most agents say it takes six weeks or more for a response, so I wait. In the meantime, I’ll send more stuff to my group and see who gets what. Maybe certain e-mail servers have problems? They shouldn’t but I don’t know the workings of this stuff well enough. I’ll probably call our local tech shop and ask their advice, too.

After the first batch of queries, normally I’d expect to hear from at least a few of them, perhaps put into practice any advice, though that’s rare, and send the second batch. One of the agencies I queried did say that if no response was received, you could send a reminder and ask if they received it. That seems the best place to start. We’ll see.

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