I'm a fan of the Victoria Sanders and Associates agency. Last Wednesday night, I submitted a query letter to the agency in hopes of earning representation for my manuscript Pride of the Lions. I spent a couple of hours crafting an introduction and a short synopsis of the manuscript.
Query letters are tough. You have about a page to get someone's interest, when most agencies like this get dozens if not hundreds of such letters a week. After the introduction of sorts you paste about 25 pages of your manuscript. I included the first four chapters, otherwise known as the pregame show. You're not allowed to attach anything, so when Microsoft Word so lovingly removes all line breaks when you paste about 18 pages of text, you have to manually add them back into the body of the e-mail.
I sent the e-mail around 11 p.m. on Wednesday. By Thursday at noon, I had a response.
Thank you for considering Victoria Sanders & Associates as a potential agency to represent your work. We have reviewed the material you sent and we regret to inform you that we will not be offering to review your work further at this time. Please know that we are very selective with the materials that we request. Thank you for considering Victoria Sanders & Associates as a potential agency for your work. We encourage you to keep writing and we wish you every success. Please forgive this impersonal note. We receive a tremendous number of queries and are forced to focus our attention on a limited number of projects.
Sincerely, Victoria Sanders
Woo hoo! A form letter! I know, it sounds bad to get a rejection. Here's why it's a very good thing. It's good that I don't need to wonder if they received my query letter and the status of it. I need to start getting rejections so the calluses form and I'll be prepared for the eventual positive response.
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