STATISTICS, APOLOGIES, AND THANKS

AGENT SEARCH STATS

Query Emails Sent: 165
Rejections received: 18
Under Consideration: 16
Failure to Deliver Notice: 5
Miscellaneous: 1

The under consideration category is, to say the least, optimistic. This category includes automatic responses like the one below.

I will be out of the office starting Monday December 15th, returning January 5th. If it is urgent you may try my assistant XXXXXX at XXXXX or XXXXXXX. Please note XXXXX will close for the holidays at 1pm on December 19th and reopen on Jan. 5th.

Optimism is paramount in this agent search business. Somebody named Tom Feather once said, “Success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after the others have let go.” Charles Bukowski didn’t have the opportunity to quit his job at the post office and earn his living from his writing until he was fifty. A hundred and sixty-five emails is peanuts, just the beginning.

I fired off 10 query emails yesterday. The agent addresses come from a lengthy writer’s reference list I found on line. http://www.writers-free-reference.com/agents/index.html. Not all of the addresses are current as the following response demonstrates.

I am retired.

Using the agent list, it’s possible to send somewhere in the vicinity of ten query emails an hour. If I could just find the time and patience to sit down for ten hours, I could send off - let’s see, carry the five, add the square root of nine - three hundred query emails. It’s all about optimism, baby.

SECOND THOUGHTS

It has been brought to my attention some of my comments have been interpreted to be bitter and approaching mean-spiritedness. Well, bitter and mean spirited is no way to build an audience. And the word on the street is agents are more apt to represent writers with strong blog followings. Therefore, I’m extending my heartfelt apologies to guys who wear #1 Dad shirts, people with eight fingers – or six, the British, Santa Clause, Paul the Apostle, pyromaniacs, filthy stinking rich celebrities, Charles Barkley, Steve Urkel, drunks, barroom brawlers, skirt chasers, Meryl Streep, Myrel Streep fans, cute nuns, The Flying Nun, nuns in general, former Catholics, future Catholics, Catholics in general, lazy parents, obsessive text messengers, and of course, hopelessly stupid people.


TO MY VAST ARMY OF ELEVEN READERS

Thank you. It’s good to have an audience.