Monday, June 28, 2010

Round Two!

I sent out my next (small) round of queries today. I was feeling a little bummed about the two rejections I've gotten so far, but reminded myself that this is normal. Every writer deals with rejection at some point, so this is just par for the course. It sucks, but what can you do but move forward?

This group included more agents that requested actual sample chapters rather than just a query letter like the first group. I find it harder to send those, mostly because I don't trust email to keep the formatting right. I can't send the pages as is: double-space and paragraphs indented. That's just asking for trouble, because chances are the email systems will lost the spacing and it'll come out as a solid block of text on the other end. I know I wouldn't want to read it like that, so I'm not taking any chances! Hopefully agents understand this and won't mind the non-standard formatting of single-space paragraphs with blank lines in between and no indents. That seems to be the standard in terms of email formatting and web publishing, so I'm crossing my fingers that it's acceptable. That seems to be the one thing not mentioned on any agency sites. Some suggest saving to an RTF file to remove weird characters, which I do, but that doesn't change the spacing. So now I have two queries out there (the third accepted attachments) that I'm worrying over, paranoid they will look strange on the receiving end. If only more agents accepted attachments (though I completely understand why they don't). Pasting my baby into the body of an email is far more stressful than I anticipated!

I swear, sometimes I wonder if I'm only happy when I'm fretting about something. I get that from my grandmother.

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