There are several organisations which will, for a fee, send your query to agents, editors and anyone else you ask them to. They usually do what they promise, and e-mail your information out to all the names on their mailing lists—and those lists can be vast, with tens of thousands of names on them. But what is the usual outcome of such a scattergun approach?
Well, first, you pay for their services. Then they send out your information; and then — nothing.
You’re unlikely to see good results. You’re even more unlikely to make back the money that you paid them. Because the queries that they send out on your behalf are not going to be personalised, addressed to individual people, or even targeted to appropriate publishers or agents who represent your genre; they will be sent out to all publishing contacts regardless of whether you’re trying to sell a book about train-spotting in 1920s Sweden or a contemporary romance novel with an S&M twist.
If they write your query letter for you, they’ll have charged you extra for this and will probably have written a formulaic, template-based, one-size-fits-all query which will do you no good at all.
Let me remind you: each time you send any of your work out, you must target the best person or people to send it to. If you had a problem with your phone bill, you wouldn’t just write to every person in every phone company you could find, would you? Regardless of what country you, or they, were in? No. You’d write to the customer services department of your phone provider, and tell them exactly what the problem was. It’s the same with queries, submissions, media packs, press releases, and review copies. You must send them to the right people, otherwise the whole exercise is a pointless waste of everyone’s time and money.
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May I just say how much I
Hate.
These.
Guys.
Their query letters are pathetic little templates that scream “I’m a noob” from ten paces.
Yes, yes, and absolutely yes. It wastes your money and annoys the recipient.
Query letters and synopses are difficult to write, but we’re writers, we must write our own agent pitches.
Excellent post.
It is frustrating how they take advantage of others. Thanks for the warning.