Cold Querying Still Works
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...