My title sounds like bad grammar (and it may very well be...), but I'm pretty sure it's a quote from one of the Star Wars movies.
Anyway, I sent out my first email query last night. I've got four more queued up and ready to go. I have a love/hate relationship with email queries. First, because I'm so not technically-adept, I'm always afraid that what looks perfectly fine on my end will come out on the other end with weird formatting and strange little characters in place of the apostrophes. Plus, I use Microsoft Works for writing--I know, I know, I need to switch over--and everyone else prefers Word for attachments and I don't know if that means RTF is okay or not. *Sigh* Hard copy is more time consuming and less environmentally friendly but at least I know what they'll be looking at when they open it.
The second reason I hate sending email queries is also a reason I love them. They're quick. Like, an instant after you send it, it's already there waiting to be read. Which means the worrying about what I wrote and what will they think and have they read it yet commences immediately and lasts for a longer period of time usually. With snail mail, I have to put in the mailbox before mail pick up and then I get to estimate about how long it takes to get to where it's going. Then I imagine that the staff in the mailroom at the agency/publishing company isn't really excited about yet another query letter, so they probably don't rush around delivering these things at a run or anything. So, it probably takes a day or two to reach the desk of the assistant or whatever. And then from there on, who know? But you can see that with snail mail I queries, I get almost a week to enjoy the feeling of accomplishment and bravery before the worry kicks in. On the other hand, email queries are usually answered much faster!
Heading home now. Will restrain myself from checking my email more than seven or eight times tonight : ) At some point this gets easier right? This is only really my third time through this process and while I know more about my role in it, I'm still this dangerous mix of nervous and excited about the whole thing.
Have a great weekend, everybody!
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I'm not sure if your computer can handle this, but you might want to also consider OpenOffice.org. It's a full office suite of products for considerably less thant the $200 MS Office costs (OpenOffice is free). I don't think you can save as Word, but you can save as a bevy of other choices that Word also treats well.
I can probably count the number of email queries I've sent out on one hand. At the time, not that many agents/editors were taking them.
(I submitted quite a few short stories via email, though.)
The quickest turnaround I had was a week. (Request to see more.) The rest either went MIA or took months to respond.
I reckon the average agent/editor gets hundreds of emails a day. It usually takes a while to slog through the pile.
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