I’ve been on legal blogging hiatus over the holidays, but today, I’m returning with a post about the importance of following posted procedures when querying agents and publishing houses. When querying agents or publishers, it’s critical that authors follow the posted submission or query guidelines exactly. Authors are often tempted to deviate from posted guidelines, either to shoehorn multiple queries into a single cover letter, to make querying “easier,” or for other reasons. DO NOT DO THIS. EVER. Literary agents and publishing houses do not create query guidelines to make authors’ lives difficult – or even to make their own lives “easy.” (Reviewing tens of
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Don’t Nuke Your Own Query Letter
Authors seeking traditional publication will need to write query letters to agents and/or publishers as part of the publishing process. The query letter is a pitch for the author’s work – and many resources exist to help authors write and perfect them. One of the best query writing resources is Janet Reid’s Query Shark blog (in fact, it’s so good that I’d rather you read it all the way through, including the comments, before going elsewhere). Writer’s Digest also offers a lot of high quality information about the querying process. However, that’s not why I’m bringing the topic up today. Today’s post is about not shooting
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