So MILK RUN has completed its tenth revision (more than that if you consider the ongoing tweaking).
I’m in the “let’s try to catch an agent phase.” It’s a focused yet humbling and frustrating stage that’s feels akin to fishing in an empty lake or playing golf with crappy clubs (it’s always the clubs you know).
It’s a time where you analyze potential agents; read their bios, ponder their wish list, check out their response stats and prioritize. Then send them a query following their exact submission instructions. Some want two chapters, others three. Some want just the first 10 pages or none at all. Some want email. Some want attachments. Others don’t; just cut and paste in all the necessary information in times roman 12 font, left justified. Some want you to fill out a questionnaire on their website or at some clearing house.
Most experts (of which I’m not) recommend that you customize your response to the agent’s unique footprint of wants, desires and whatever. Then you wait, wait, wait.
Yea, I get it. Anyone with a word processor is a budding John Michael Scalzi or James S. A. Corey (he’s actually two guys you know) waiting to be discovered. I’d hate to be the agent having to read through all those exciting and well written submissions. No wonder many shut their query submission windows down to just a few days a month.
So, what’s the rate of return on my effort? Oh yea, I forgot. I’m not in it for the money. I just love the characters and the story I get to create. Got to keep that in mind.
Like fishing, this process is fraught with emotional ups and downs. Sometimes it feels like I found that perfect agent only to feel that 10 pound trout jerk away. Looking through one agent’s wish list, I got excited that she was looking for a Sci-Fi space opera with strong but troubled characters, some horror and from an underrepresented author group. Then I crashed and burned at the bottom of her wish list reading the words, no military or hard science submissions . . . sigh. So, I move on.
Fortunately, there are plenty of tools to ease the submission process. And that appeals to my geeky desire for an orderly trackable and repeatable method to get all this work done. One of those is QueryTracker. For two fists full of dollars a month (that means premium subscription), I get access to an up-to-date database of agents and publishers along with a tool to send out and track submitted queries. It makes the agent research and analysis effort a lot easier. It also helps that more and more agents are leveraging QueryTracker’s online questionnaire form that allows for quick reuse of common query information like tag lines, query letter, synopsis and sample pages. It’s not perfect, but it’s a lot better than what it was several years ago.
So, here I am – fishing for an agent or publisher to partner with to further polish and bring MILK RUN to a larger audience. The score so far: three rejections and three hundred and forty seven to go.
Wish me luck!
Oh yea, click here if you want in on the next selection round of Beta Readers for MILK RUN.
And ahh, click here if you want to read a quick updated synopsis of MILK RUN.
