Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Worst query letter bloopers

I've written many, many professional letters. Query letters are the hardest. They are hard to compose, and hard to hone, and hard to get just right. (Is there a perfect query letter?)
There may not be a perfect query letter - but we know that there are lots of imperfect ones.
Like the one I wrote stating...
"I'd like to send my novel for possible repersentation..."
Repersentation? I saw that after I hit the 'send' button, of course.
There are worse mistakes. Over at Miss Snark's blog a writer admitted to mispelling his first name. He said he'd carefully gone over the whole letter a hundred times....and mispelled his first name. (Sincerely yours, Boob)
Once I sent off a query and realized I hadn't put the title of the book anywhere, and another time I cheerfully wrote "Thank you for your kid attention."
Another person (again from Miss Snark's blog) wrote as his opening line: "I am sure you are very busty but hope you will..."
Or this one I sent off just recently: "It was perviously published..."
I would have thought spell check would have caught that one. LOL.

4 comments:

WriterForHire said...

I totally laughed out loud during this entire post--thanks for that!

Bernita said...

I stopped reading mine after I hit send - I'd rather not know what idiocy I committed.

Stacia said...

I confess--I'm the one who misspelled my first name! I felt like a big old dumbass, but luckily I got an email from the agent saying she got everything just fine, so hopefully she didn't really notice!

Anonymous said...

You're welcome WFH, glad to be of help!
And Bernita - I think you have the best idea.
Decembre!! How could you? LOL!
At least your name wasn't Bob.
:-)
Sam