...a request for a partial makes. Took a chance and sent an e-query to an agent who's recently gone off on her own. As per the requirements, the query letter was one page and the synopsis was brief.
Now, if I'd sent a snail mail query, I would have included the first fifteen to twenty pages, in line with the submission policy. That tells me that the agent wants to judge the author's ability to write, which is good in case my query letter was particularly lame. To tack fifteen pages into the body of the e-mail, on the other hand, isn't going to work out very well, and I'm not about to re-type that much material.
What would Miss Snark say? Paste in the first two or three pages, which is not a lot of extra reading and which demonstrates some basic command of grammar, punctuation, spelling, and general cohesion. Fair play to you, Miss Snark.
The agent asked for a sample of fifty pages, not the fifteen or twenty of the submission requirements. Sure, I know it might not indicate anything, but I'd like to believe that the first three pages were good enough to lead her to ask for a little more. She knows how the story plays out, having read the synopsis, and if the sample pages truly sucked rotten eggs, she would have taken a pass.
Then again, she's just getting off the ground with her own agency and the poor thing's maybe desperate for clients. Once she reads the fifty page sample, she's liable to experience a cerebral vascular accident, or her eyes may pop out of her head and flee in terror.
Until I hear from her again, I can live contentedly in my lovely little dream world, a reverie of royalty checks and the other three manuscripts being snatched up by a drooling publisher who hosts book release cocktail parties in a posh Manhattan brownstone. I'll have some of what you're having.
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