The Shocking Query Mistakes That Could Doom Your Book Before Agents Ever Read It – Avoid These Now!
TURNING UP ON AN AGENT’S DOORSTEP
This has happened to Lynne on several occasions and, as well as being very creepy, doing that will not endear you to your prospective agent. Nor will delivering flowers, chocolates, hampers, or getting your cute five-year-old daughter to hand-deliver your manuscript, wrapped in gold wrapping paper, to the door make her change her mind.
Lynne receives over 7,000 submissions a year. Of these, nearly a quarter are rejected due to the above mistakes. Many are also binned because it is obvious that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has written the query letter, and often the rest of the manuscript. Most of the others are rejected because the story is not strong enough – the voice is not original, or, as sometimes happens, an author has had the manuscript professionally edited and the editor has removed the author’s voice. I queried Lynne about this, and she said, “A voice is more than a style of writing and more than the words on the page; it’s the way the whole thing is pulled together, and whilst hard to put my finger on, I know it when I see it.”
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