We're almost there...

I have just one set of questions left (after today's). Thank you so much everyone who participated, and I hope you've found this series of Q&A helpful.

Danyelle said... Thanks for your generosity. :)Question: If you have more than one offer of representation, how do you handle telling the other agents that you didn't pick?

After you have carefully made an informed decision on which agent is best for you, the best way to let the other agents know is to send them a professional and kind email letting them know of your decision. Unless you feel like you had a closer relationship throughout the process that would necessitate a phone call. But usually, an email is sufficient.

Theresa Milstein said... Since we often send queries with pages, how do we know when it's the query or the pages or other?

I'm assuming you're asking when should you send pages and when should you just send the query? This is where your research becomes very important. Find the most up to date information on the agent you are querying (through agentquery.com, their websites, etc.). They will tell you what they want. However, if an agent says "query only," I'd usually send the first page with it (pasted in the email) so they could see a small sample of my writing and include a sentence that said, "I am also including a one-page excerpt from ____." (Or something like that.) I had a couple of author friends recommend I do that, and I found it was generally a good thing.

Brooke said... Great contest and thank you for your generosity!My question is what happens if you have more than one project ready to query?

In my opinion and from what I know, I say you pick the one that you think is the best, and you only query that one. (As long as they are the same genre or "age group"--aka, both YA, or both non-ficton, etc. so the same agent could represent both of them.) Once you have an agent interested, then you can tell them about your other project. However, I've had someone else tell me recently that she disagrees and thinks you should let them know in the query that you have another one ready. Everything I ever read or have heard is NOT to do that, but she is a knowledgeable person and says she's had success with it. So you may want to research that one a little bit more.

We're half way through the week, and so far mine has been awesome. I can only hope the trend continues! How about you? Is January 2011 treating you well?