Saturday, November 11, 2006

To Save A Tree

I sent a query and the requested sample chapters to Alicka Pistek
six weeks ago, and have yet to hear back. No surprise, there, as six weeks is not long enough of a wait. The last time I queried her, it took eight months to get a response.

Clearly she has learned that the overwhelming number of snail mail queries is crowding her out of her office. There's a letter, a synopsis and three chapters worth of paper in every envelope, and it doesn't take long for a one-woman operation to get so swamped that she's close to drowning in pulpy slush. That would explain her recent change in submission policy.

Ms. Pistek was once a snail-mail only type of literary agent. Now, a check of her website reveals that she has joined the other camp, accepting queries electronically only. For the author, it will take a a bit of technological savvy to copy and paste three sample chapters into the body of the e-mail without losing all the formatting. I've not had much luck myself, having lost the double line spacing in the first and last paragraphs copied. Then there's the issue of the italics and quotation marks, getting lost or replaced by bizarre symbols.

No more mountains of paper for Ms. Pistek. All is stored in the memory of some internet server, the slush pile reduced to the size of a laptop computer. And as for her time, that's to be saved as well. With electronic queries, a no answer is a no. The agent can read the query, and hit delete. Done, finished, gone forever, and you the author will never know if your bundle of literary goodness was ever received or considered. Don't you just love a mystery?

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