Queries and Query Tracker [dot] Net

To be honest, things fell a little by the wayside for a while. I recently put in a big (huge) push to get my bloody self organized and get cracking on my agent listings. When I started updating things, I found out that perhaps about 20% of it was out of date; people moved on, closed for submissions, they changed the genres they were looking for. So of the near 30 agents listed, I had submitted less than a dozen, the others all requiring updating.

All this was embarrassingly compounded by a visit to Querytracker.net.

To be brutally honest, I had done a big push and then stalled, due to real life concerns. A second big push and Querytracker’s help netted me a total of 80 additional agents/agencies looking for fantasy/epic fantasy; this list does not include direct to publisher submission possibilities. Fantastic! Two days of concerted efforts and quick checks of blogs, submission guidelines and a run through over at the Absolute Write forums drew this back down to a 73 and a plan forward. I’ve identified the agents/agencies I thought best fit my manuscript and fired away seven.

I have the following series of queries to be prepared, with technical notes and details for each (email addresses, specific agents’s names, etc). Now I’ve given myself the following 3-4 weeks to research and target queries to each agent’s individual quirks and specifications.

Long story short: have a plan and stick to it.

Thanks to Querytracker, Google, Absolute Write and a host of agent and reader blogs, things don’t seem as daunting.