I think I am done revising my query letter. I got another request for a partial tonight (he wants it mailed snail mail, so it will go out Monday). That's 3 partial requests and a "no response yet" from the last small batch of queries I sent out. I'm feeling pretty darn good about that. Either I've had a run of extraordinary good luck, or my query letter can't get any better. Probably both. Either way, I'm happy with where my query letter is at.
Now. The first 3 chapters. Are they perfect? Are they going to force the agent to sit up, take notice, and ask me for my full? Let's hope so. I have a great crit group and I've taken a lot of their advice. I love track changes, because I can accept the changes of the first person who edits my work, then copy and paste the changed chapter right into my full text of the manuscript. After that it gets tricky. When the second person edits I have to go through the edited version and my version and compare changes and make them by hand if I want to keep them. (If I accepted the changes and then copied and pasted into my document, I would lose all the changes the first person helped make.)
Hmmm...Tina...any ideas???
If I DO get a request for a full, what will I do then? My crit group has found all the hads in my first few chapters...but I've got a total of 18 in my book!!! Maybe if any of us get a full request, we can make it top priority to get our lucky member's book critiqued asap??? Again, just thinking out loud. Maybe I should email these thoughts to my crit group rather than blog about them. But I have blogspot open, not yahoo groups, so there you go. Sorry folks!
Past Missteps
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Several years ago, when I was much stupider, I briefly interned for a
reasonably well-known agent. I let her know ahead of time that I had a
v...
2 months ago
Penny,
ReplyDeleteOh, yeah! A full is definitely a priority!
What I've been doing is printing out the "unchanged" chapter, then opening up each one of the crits. I mark the printed chapter up with red ink then have at it.
You guys have helped me tremendously, too. I'm feeling PRETTY good about how well our group came together:D
If you're giving out hard copies to your crit group, then I think the thing to do is as Tina does. Wait till they all get back to you with their edits/suggetions, then sit down with your own hard copy and adopt what you want. If you're doing everything electronically, then they can use the editing functions in whatever word processing software you're using -- in red. So they'd use strikethroughs for all their suggested cuts and red type for all their suggested additions.
ReplyDelete