Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Stoooopid mistakes!

So ... as I'm getting some email queries sent out today, I realize that my sample pages have some bold formatting that won't matter since my email is plain text. I decide to use all caps to set off these subheadings rather than bold, and as I'm putting the letters in all caps, I notice a huge mistake. A dumb mistake. A big, huge, dumb mistake.

Before this last edit, my story had four main characters. The title of the book referred to these four characters and had the word four in it, and a couple of the section headings included the word four.

I recognized that my ms was just too long (120,000 words), so I made the decision to cut out one of the characters completely, which meant the name of book needed to change to include the word three rather than four.

Can you see where I made my mistake?

I never changed the "four" references in the section headings to "three." So ridiculous.

Imagine you're an agent ... after reading a query about three main characters and then a synopsis about three main characters, you then see a section heading that reads: Four First Days. What the? It makes no sense whatsoever.

Remember when I was talking about querying agents who mostly likely would never get back to me? At the time I remember wondering why I was taking the time to query agents who seemed super unlikely to really give me a chance. And now I know. So I can fix my mistakes in these first few queries (odd formatting, wrong words, etc.), and then send awesome queries from here on out.

One agent I recently queried mentioned on Twitter that out of the last 10 queries she's received, only three followed the guidelines somewhat, and the rest weren't even close. I did a quick review in my head about my query and then figured I did it right.

But then today, again, as I'm sending out emails, I realize that she asked for the first chapter and I sent out the first SECTION (which is three chapters). Sigh.

This is my second time around. You'd think I'd be better at this. 

Why do I put myself through this?!

'Cause deep down it's exciting, and pursuing your dream is fun.

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