Agent Meeting Experience

[ColGray]

@Toby Frost Exactly. They're all slightly different but they tell you what they want.

The Query letter is highly standardized in what it should (and should not) include, how many words and what's helpful. In short, 250 words to hook someone into reading your opening pages, plus opening pages that hook a reader into wanting to read more. Word choice, precision and concision are repeatedly lauded.

Query Shark (RIP) and Jane Friedman have two oft-referenced articles on the subject--though it seems like the process and expectations tend to drift across time and trend.

QueryTracker is tremendously helpful in identifying, organizing, distributing and tracking queries in a central location (and it's free). For $25 you can add in additional features, like, micro/macro data on agents/agencies/genre and word count trends/etc.

 

[Steve Harrison]

They will all say what they want on their websites, but it's often a covering letter, synopsis of 1-2 pages, and the first three chapters (or 10,000 words) of the manuscript, double-spaced and page numbered.

That's pretty standard for novels, though I've seen a few guidelines lately asking for the first ten pages. That seems too little to assess, but I suppose if agents/publishers are not smitten by brief sentence or paragraph description in the letter, they probably don't even bother reading the synopsis or sample.

From my years querying agents, managers and producers with screenplays, the query was just the a brief logline (one or two sentences) and a short bio. If that captured them, they'd ask for the script. If not, I don't most would even get to the bio. What I did discover was that most people you query don't read scripts at all. They read loglines and if a script is requested, they have people who read them before a recommendation or rejection.

I had a bizarre meeting in Hollywood with some executives who 'loved' one of my scripts, but during the meeting it became clear neither of them had read it and someone had given them a few briefing notes!

 

[ColGray]

One of the things I found really helpful in the Jane Friedman query letter seminar was that she and another editor from the big 5 reiterated:
1) The pages are 100x more important than the query. The query is there to entice, but great manuscripts with mediocre queries get picked up all the time. A great query might give you some additional grace with the opening pages, but bad pages are bad pages.

2) They went through 5 people's opening pages and and 5 other people's queries and called out, I stopped reading here--and then why. The query feedback moved between, This is boring, This is confusing, and, This query told me about the world, not the story.

Of the 5 opening pages, I think they got to the third paragraph on one. The other four they ended prior to the first 200 words and called out specifics, but they all boiled down to: This is passive/slow/unengaging.

 

[Toby Frost]

1) The pages are 100x more important than the query.

This is the first encouraging thing I've read about publishing for ages. I'm tempted to say "Of course they should be" but in this game, who knows?

Once, in my glory days, I was on a panel that looked at the openings of manuscripts. I've never been either an agent or a publisher, but as a writer and someone coming cold to a piece of work, it was surprising how many quickly got something noticeably wrong.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

I am not sure why you are encouraged. It just means that the process is different in book publishing than it is in producing a script.

Because if the studio loves the idea and thinks that it has blockbuster potential, but they are lukewarm about the actual script, they may option the script and then bring in some of their own people to help rewrite it. In fact, it might go through several treatments.

But with a book proposal, well, if the query doesn't interest them, they are unlikely to so much as glance at the rest of the proposal. So the query can sink the proposal at the very beginning. But no matter how much the query may intrigue them, if the accompanying pages are a big disappointment, there is no way they are going to bring in other writers to polish up the book. The manuscript is just as dead in the water as if they hated the query. (There is, of course, a middle ground. They may love the idea, and find the pages mildly disappointing but showing some promise, in which case they may ask for rewrites based on editorial suggestions. But the pages have to be of a certain standard before that will happen. That's why they are the most important.)

 

[Toby Frost]

Because it suggests that the quality of the writing actually matters, rather than just the concept/pitch/gimmick/etc behind it. Otherwise writing risks becoming like one of those cheap SF films where the trailer is the best bit. That said, I'm not writing scripts. It also means that a person like me, who is socially quite awkward, is less likely to immediately fail by not getting the query exactly right before we anyone sees the writing (although I will be definitely trying to get it exactly right).