Please be my agent!

The query letter for my novel, "Stiletto in Old Street", used to be awful. Thanks to online advice from Nathan Bransford and Agent Kristin amongst others it's now brilliant. I wish. I sent a batch of four out today; the response rate might tell me something. Last time I sent five inferior queries and got one request for what we in the trade call 'a partial'.

It's an appalling time to query. See Crapometer today for some of the reasons why.

Those of you who are not aspiring writers may wonder what a 'query letter' is. It's the letter you send to agents describing your novel and begging them to represent you. There's a formula available – see Nathan's blog. If you know about that, you're on to a good start. The challenge is to be unique and persuasive and gripping and outstanding within that formula. I'm sure an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters could get it right, but for the rest of us there are an infinite number of pitfalls.

For example, you are supposed to say something personal about the agent. What if you don't know anything personal about them? I'm querying UK agents. Half of them don't have websites. I can't find their author lists and when I do I've never heard of anyone on them.

Common advice is to find books that are like yours, find out who the authors' agents are and then query them. Bingo! You're agented!

Yeah, yeah, that's so not going to happen. For a start I can't find any books like mine. They must be out there but I have not been able to locate them in Cahersiveen Library. Furthermore, this technique would probably generate a list of maybe five agents. What do we do if they all say no? Give up? Well yes, that's what they'd like us to do at 101 Reasons to Stop Writing. But I'm too bloody-minded, at least for now.

So I get my agents from the "Writers' and Artists' Yearbook". There's a whole list in there, over a hundred of them. If they have an asterisk beside their name they're members of the society of agents or something, and that means they get a query from me. Eventually. I'm starting at the end, on the principle that the agents at the beginning probably get a lot more queries.

When I've run out of asterisked agents I'll take my chances with the unasterisked. (Incidentally I did once send a highly personalised query to an (unasterisked) agent who claimed to like representing both women's fiction and crime. My crime novel has a contemporary, chick-litty tone. A perfect match! Plus her agency promises to respond to emailed queries within a week. That was in May '08 and I still haven't heard back.)

When I've queried all the unasterisked agents, I'll either give up or self-publish. It depends on just how bloody-minded I turn out to be.