Sandra Dijkstra made her name when she took a chance on Amy Tan, and the rest is ethnic fiction history.
Her agency expanded, but now her agency has contracted.
Agents Jill Marsal and Kevan Lyon have gone off on their own, and Ms. Dijkstra can no longer accept submissions of romance (Ms. Lyon's specialty) or mystery (Ms. Marsal's niche).
Operating under the assumption that a new agency needs more clients than those who followed the exiting agents, I'll be sending a submission to the Marsal Lyon Literary Agency as soon as I can decide which manuscript to query.
They'll be getting swamped with those of us who know how to take advantage of that particular angle, so I'll need my most effective query letter, the one that has the strongest hook in the first paragraph.
But do any of my query letters have such an intriguing, must-keep-reading opening? Or is it more a matter of having the right story that either Ms. Lyon or Ms. Marsal know that a particular editor is looking for?
I'm voting for the right story. The newly aligned pair has to generate cash, and quickly, to pay the bills, and they won't have a spot for some beautiful prose that won't garner much of an advance, even if they could find someone to buy it.
1 comment:
And it's a rejection in less than an hour....that's cold.
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