There Should Be A Standard Template For Literary Submissions

Literary agents love -- love -- their arbitrary submission requirements. A query letter is a given, but besides that, they may or may not want a "short" synopsis or an undefined-length synopsis (I always went with the short one, because...why overtax myself for something that will rarely be read?)

Or they want a "bio". Well, my bio is included in the query, because I've studied the query format for years, so I just paste the part of the query that includes my bio into that particular slot (if I'm using Query Manager). 

Then comes the fun part: first chapter, first page (really?), first three chapters, but not more than fifty pages; first ten pages, first twenty-five pages, first two-and-a-half pages (okay, I made that one up). 

Do you know how many stupid individual word documents I've had to create just to satisfy each agency's whims? And the sad part is, they (meaning the interns) barely read the query letter, and they never even get to the pages. 

It's a form of medieval water torture.

And Query Manager is fun. I've pasted in the required pages only to find that half of them are THIS BIG. Then I have to try to reconfigure them so they conform to the standard font size. This requires re-pasting the text into a new document, and if that doesn't work, copying them into notepad, then into a new doc, then reapplying the formatting and crossing my fingers that this time it'll work.

 

Email queries can also be a giant frustration. I've pasted my twenty or thirty or fifty pages into the body of the email, only to find that random passages now contain heavy blue underlining.

All the while I'm tearing my hair out, chastising myself for even caring enough to fix the formatting errors; I am keenly aware that my efforts will be rewarded with a swift rejection or stone silence.

A better idea would be a dedicated website in which an author could upload all the required query elements and simply send the agent a link. 

And speaking of Query Manager, my least favorite questions are:

• List a similar book. (I haven't read any novels for maybe three years, so how the hell would I know?) In addition, maybe my manuscript isn't like any other novel!
• What led you to query us? Well, your name was on the Query Tracker list.
• Who is the target audience for your book? People who like to read? 

I'm not a good fit for the querying process. I like to control my own destiny; not bow and scrape before someone else's (some stranger's) whims. Therefore, like Once In A Blue Moon and Radio Crazy before this novel, I will self-publish.

Sure, self-publishing is a losing game, but at least I'll be able to download a copy to my Kindle, and I can read it whenever I want.  

If I ever write another novel (and that's a big "if") I'll skip the degrading query process and go straight to self-publishing. 

I refuse to play their game again.