Cold Querying Still Works

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After locking myself away, secluded from society like the pictured monk, cold querying the entire state of New York and half the Atlantic Seaboard to find an agent to represent my medical thriller, I wondered how much trouble other writers had cold querying agents.

Then, like a streak of light, this was an interesting post that came across on the PubRants blog, which I found from the Guide to Literary Agents blog.

Guest blogger Megan Crewe, writing on agent Kristin Nelson's site, explains how she polled 270 successful fiction authors and asked them if they broke in with a referral (a personal connection with someone in the business) or whether they cold queried an agent with success.

The results came back and 62% of the authors got their agent with just a cold query. Pretty amazing - but more than that: encouraging! As agent Dan Lazar once saying that "A good query trumps all else - every time."

Many people have asked me how I got my foot in the door: did I know someone, did I have connections, was it from a personal introduction?

The answer to all of these, is no.  

I did it the old fashioned way, cold query and a lot of persistence.   One thing that definitely helped me is that I engaged Gina Denny to help spruce up my query.  I believe it cost $80 for three readthroughs of the query and detailed feedback.  She definitely picked up aspects that I hadn't considered, and unknowingly, brought forth a significant improvement in the main manuscript with one of her suggestions.  She was very easy to work with and very professional. 

I kept a written folder (sorry that's the way I do it, still mostly analog) of all the agencies I queried, and which agent.  if I got a no, or a no response after 90 days, I'd query another agent at the agency.  Then, I researched a list of all the publishers out there that specialize in Thrillers, and queried them. 

Don't know how good my query was, but I did get several requests to read the manuscript or for partials before I was accepted by Penmore Press to publish the novel.

Now keep your fingers crossed on that sale!

So take hope!

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