A couple of days ago, I blogged about Nathan Bransford’s Agent for a Day experiment. On Wednesday, he posted the first thirty pages of the five random queries used in the experiment on Wednesday, and then yesterday he posted his takeaway from the experiment. What I found most striking was that he had picked the five queries at random from a sample submitted for the contest–and they were all pretty good. From the sample pages provided, the manuscripts themselves also had promise. But Nathan mentioned that they all needed “some work and polish before they’d be ready.” In other words, the writers queried too soon. Which isn’t to say that he would necessarily take on any of the writers down the road, only that they didn’t give themselves the best possible chance.

This is something I struggle with, too. I’ve come to look at the process of getting a manuscript published as if I am the agent for my characters. It pains me to think I’m not doing a good job representing them as much as it pains me to think I might not have written their story well enough. But how do you know?

How do you know when you’ve done the best you can do? How do you know when you are ready to query?

Does anyone else have this problem?

I’ve found a couple of good posts on the subject, but I’m still waiting for the epiphany that will keep me from doing it again. Janet Reid recommends that we succeed in writing a brilliant one-page synopsis and write a second novel before querying the first one. What do you think? Does that resonate?

Here are the links:

http://jodyhedlund.blogspot.com/2010/01/how-to-know-when-to-query.html
http://www.genreality.net/2-years-3-manuscripts-and-50-rejections-anatomy-of-an-agent-search?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Genreality+%28GENREALITY%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
http://jetreidliterary.blogspot.com/2009/06/how-soon-is-too-soon.html

Cheers,

Martina

P.S. – Here’s a great post by Write It Sideways about the 25 Reasons (Janet Reid says) Your Query Letter Gets Rejected.  (Janet Reid is the Query Shark for those of you who haven’t seen her fantastic blog site).

http://writeitsideways.com/25-reasons-your-query-letter-sucks/

P.P.S. – I had to come back and add this. Either Nathan’s blog got a lot of us thinking along the same lines, or we are into the realm of the kind of coincidences you should avoid in fiction. Roni Griffin from Fiction Groupie just reposted an earlier blog about Should You Query Your First Novel, and her post is fantastic.

Check it out here:

http://fictiongroupie.blogspot.com/2010/04/face-off-friday-should-you-query-first.html