Friday, April 25, 2008

Hang Up Or Try Again

"...reply to all email queries....whether we are interested or not." Or not.

I'm not entirely against e-mail queries, but I can't get used to not getting any sort of reply back. How can I tell if it was received, or ended up in some spam filter? Robert Astle says he'll respond for sure, as long as I follow his guidelines.

And I do follow, straight down the path as marked. The e-mail subject says "Query", I hail the agent as Dear Robert, and I paste in my query letter with its three paragraphs of pure literary bliss.

That was ten weeks ago. There's been no response.

Do I resubmit? Hang it up?

Not that snail-mail is any better these days. Anita Diggs has a new agency, but she must be swamped. I've been waiting seven weeks for the SASE to show up in the post. Stephanie Cabot of The Gernert Company has had a full month's head start on Ms. Diggs, and there's no SASE coming back from her agency either. Did they arrive? Or is there a bag of mail in some sewer in Lower Manhattan, rotting away to pulp?

No responses to e-mail. No responses to hard copies. Is there anybody out there?

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