It’s been a while since I’ve queried any agents and, for some reason, looking out over a wild and wooly lake in County Kerry, I decided to have one last crack at getting Trip to the Quiet Room into the hands of an agent.

Well, the tools agents are using are really excellent now… I particularly like QueryManager and some of the questions agents put to you for your submission.

Now, I have no idea what the agent experience is, but as a prospective client, I appreciated the little differences agents added to their submission page. For example, one (Jennifer Herrington), asks you what you’re currently reading, what your favourite book is, what character you most connect with (I am Radar, by Reif Larson and Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel, The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brian, and Arthur Dent). While others will stick to simpler questions, or maybe who the audience for your book is.

Otherwise, that’s it from me, no other news.

I hope you’re enjoying the very dregs of 2020 somewhere safe and sound, and I hope to all that’s holy and good that we can all get together at the Dalkey Book Festival in 2021

Following on my last post, that ever hopeful sending off of actual pages to a literary agent, I was going through my submissions list when it dawned on me that I’ve been sending out packages to agents for Trip to the Quiet Room for a long-ish time*.

For the curious (?), I use Tinderbox (yes, I am a version behind — but Mark has a summer sale on at this very second) for keeping track of prospective agents, submissions, contests, publications, even first readers.

Tinderbox, along with PublishersMarketplace, QueryTracker, help me research (stalk?) agents and figure out who my best targets might be. Each prospective agent gets a note to themselves with some info about how to contact them, whether or not they’re open for submissions, where I found out about them, favorite foods, times they leave the house, how many pets, and what types of locks they have on their house, office, boathouse, and gym locker.

They get rough ratings, depending on how likely I think they are to like the story behind Trip to the Quiet Room (also known as Butterfly and William Murphy’s Trip to the Quiet Room over that time), though, judging by the length of time I’ve been sending out submissions and hunting for agents, maybe I’m not rating them right.

So I was looking through my list of agents and marking the latest submission sent out (the scoreboard is not looking great, that soul-sucking void has got a huge lead) when I decided to check my very first submission (to an agent named Mollie Glick, who I thought would be perfect for Butterfly because she repped a book about a whaling family**).

25th of June, 2014.

Wow. I’ve come a long way (without having come very far at all). The query letter has changed a lot over the years, some with greater success of just getting a response (instead of just flinging off into The Void — this letter to Ms. Glick is still out there in the void, I’m guessing she’s going to pass on the submission)

This will make a great story to tell Oprah, at some point, I’m sure. And when I’m sitting down in a coffee shop with J.K. Rowling and we’re both sending tweets to each other instead of speaking, we’ll compare just how many people passed on our books before we finally got a good, solid bite…

* Some glaciers might disagree with me, but I’ve got my own back on them by leaving a hair dryer running constantly, night and day, speeding up the process of global warming.

** Logic has never, ever been my strong suit.

I’m thinking I may need to re-think my strategy for submitting good old Trip to the Quiet Room to agents and publishers.

I’m thinking of ditching the query letter altogether and going with pictures of cats reading books.

Thoughts?

I feel like I should get some credit for including at least three of the ten trending micro-genres, according to Audible.com.

Trip to the Quiet Room is a story about an ex-hockey pro struggling with his retirement, possible post-concussion symptoms, family life after the daily grind of a professional athlete’s routine, and the explosion of a time machine in his bathtub. It’s a story about escaping to the seaside to tend butterflies. It’s a story about a mysterious orphan showing up on the doorstop of Central Massachusetts’ favorite tourist attraction. It’s about a cotton candy factory that employs child labor for better or worse. It’s a story about the FBI playing catch-up with some of the CIA’s rumored more esoteric investigation techniques.

Surely this would make some sort of Audible.com list, if only someone would publish it…