Your posts are very insightful and useful to those of us on the other side of the business. I agree with you that the partnership you forge with a client is a key to building successful relationships with publishers, too. The ways a writer expresses their goals and themselves provide valuable clues about their personality.

As important as it is for an author to “sell the book” or “sell the idea” to an agent or publisher through a query, it is still necessary the author seems rational and informed. And yes, as authors, we MUST have a work that is marketable while we work on making ourselves marketable, too.

The person behind the work IS important; I agree wholeheartedly.

We are a package–author and manuscript (especially now that technology makes authors even more accessible to the public).

And we need to keep in mind that as authors we bear a great amount of the responsibility when it comes to marketing our books, too… Recently I’ve heard lots of authors say “writing’s the easy part.” 😉

Keep up the great work, Rachelle!
~Saoirse
PS–$25K for a newbie? I’m pretty darn thrilled with 10K… 😀

So my first query was sent out for a book that was only half-written!

Now I know that publishers won’t buy unfinished manuscripts from unpublished authors. While what he said might be true of non-fiction (and I suspect that it is), he was speaking at a major fiction writer’s conference, and should have known better.

After another two years of reading about queries, I’m better informed. (Plus the topic has gotten immensely popular in the meantime!) I have to say, though, that the query is still a completely mysterious beast, defying rules, logic, and gravity. That’s partly because different agents like different things in a query–as well as different things in a book, of course. And, being human, an agent might love a query on Tuesday that she would have autorejected on Monday.

1. Don’t be too hard on the poor novice query writers! There are lots of sources that tell us, when composing a query, to “sell the book,” “promote it,” “talk it up,” etc. So, for someone who is inexperienced, perhaps even very young (like a college student), they might mistakenly take that to mean that they need to praise it in terms that may sound silly to an agent, but are heartfelt to them. Often these swaggers are attempts to overcome deep insecurities about their writing and inexperience.

2. I literally had heart palpitations when I read this sentence: “…a nice little 25k advance with a medium sized publisher… “

I had no idea, you could get as much as $25K for a book, even with a huge publisher. I had heard somewhere that the average income for writers was $3K per year. So I never even dreamed that someone could get that much just for an advance, unless they were well-established.

I am taking deep, slow breaths now….

There are two extremes agents (*or anyone in business, not just agents*) might fall into, the first deals with the person who is genuinely agreeable, but their work product is poor or shoddy, while the other is the type might be a bit of a jerk, but their writing is phenomenal. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe what your grievance appears to be writers whose work product is not good and their personality is poor. (* A double wammie. )

(wammie being a technical term. 😉 *)

Pardon the sidebar, but I kind of wanted to illustrate my point with a story.
You’re a biblical scholar, so you’ll appreciate this one. (*New Testament*) This is one of my favorite stories btw, so any chance to tell it is always a plus.
There is a scripture passage where there were two brothers and their father told them to go out into the field and do some work. The first one said, “Sure dad I’ll go right out and do that.” BUT he didn’t do it. The second son went “forget you. I’ll do whatever I want and I sure DON’T want to do your work.” but after some time he relented that he had been harsh with his dad. He doesn’t tell his dad that he’s going to do it, but goes into the field and completes the work. Words do matter, but actions solidify the words and if they don’t line up they mean nothing.
I kind of wish that querying was based more on the pages and less on the cover letter, though because querying without pages is like going to a sports agent and having to describe how you’d play.
Having said that writers should know better than to say ridiculous statements they couldn’t possibly back up even if they were a great writer. I will definitely give you that.

So in the same way there are writers out there that may seem like sourpusses, ego maniacs, eccentrics, but their work product does come from the heart and if you peal back the layers you might be surprised as to who the person is.
Sometimes a person’s personality may get in the way of your working relationship which obviously is a detriment to the business relationship (*this WOULD be something worth passing on a MS*), but I think both writers and agents should look at the personality of the one their dealing with while respecting the fact that quality of performance does matter. Striking a balance is key.

That’s all I was saying. I meant no offense. Really. 🙂
It was a cool topic.

I thought they’d say pulitzer instead of nobel though. 😉 That’s a rather loony claim.

I DO care who the writer is, just as the writer cares (or should care, in my opinion) who the agent is. We each need to find the partner with whom we think we can forge a productive partnership.

Some agents may disagree; we all do things our own way. This is the way I look at it.

Good topic.

I’ve enjoyed reading the comments too.

Great question, Gwen. Glad you asked it and it’s answered.

Nice stuff here!

There’s nothing wrong with having confidence in your work. I have confidence that my manuscript will sell, I even have confidence that it’s something people will want to read to the very end–but rather than stating how ‘super duper awesome omgyurgonnabesorichifyouagentme’ that I or this book is–I’d rather have my work speak for itself.

Less is more in this case…definitely.