I try not to send queries on Fridays, or before holidays. My thinking is that the recipient is busy getting the day's chores finished up before the weekend, and my query will get more focused attention on other days. Or am I overthinking it?
You're not over thinking this; you're underthinking it.
You're thinking queries are handled like normal email.
They're not.
Here at Shark Central, when a query arrives in my inbox, I take a very quick look.
Is my name in the salutation?
Is there an attachment?
If the query clears these two hurdles, I usher it in to the purgatory file labelled "Incoming Queries" there to languish with others of its kind until I decide to take a look.
That could be an hour.
Or a day.
More likely it's a week.
For many agents it's longer than that.
You can send on Monday morning at 9am.
That doesn't mean anything
in terms of how much focused attention you'll get. Or even a reliable indication of when it gets eyeballs at all.
Now, other agents handle their incoming queries through QueryTracker.
They don't even SEE the query till they open the application, log in and start reading.
When you query doesn't
matter at all. Obsess about something else. Like pacing.
Any questions?
7 comments:
I obsessed over pacing last night. Back and forth in my kitchen for an hour.
Got my steps in, but I didn't make any progress on chapter 54 of my WIP.
Tonight, I'm going to obsess over conflict. Oh boy, my wife is not gonna be happy about these new career goals.
Oh, yeah. We could really go bonkers trying to game out THE Ideal Time to Query.
John Davis Frain, I could never get my steps to count when I do them in my apartment. I've sometimes gone into the stairwell and gone up and down a number of times to get my steps in
I've obsessed over writing, dogs, work, illness, genealogy, learning about the publishing industry, friends, music, books, writing, reading, marketing...
When it comes to querying, though, I only obsess over making sure I have the best query being emailed to the right agent (is their name spelled right?) with no typos or other mistakes. The timing of the query is "when I can".
No questions. This helps to be reassured. But as someone in the query trenches, and in danger of being buried six feet under them again, we will continue to obsess over response times until those rejections come in.
And I thought it would be more efficient to get my steps in on the bike, but it felt like I was just going in circles. Ok, back to the new piece.
OP, if you're not using it already, Querytracker may be eye-opening. Even if the agent doesn't use it, many writers manually put their data in. Some agents are very methodical and some jump around so nothing is totally predictable, but at least you can see that you are not alone in the waiting. You can also see the mountains of queries that agents receive. Be careful though because the sheer amount of data can lead to obsessions that aren't productive. But five min every few days just to check on things helps me.
I miss querying. NOT. Hang in there.
And many of us query from over the seas - if I'd worried about time I'd never have queried (I really don't do time zone changes well).
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