Friday Scorecard
by Richard Perkins
My epic agent quest continues, but without much success. I’ve received two more rejections and one request for a partial since my last update.
These latest responses are a mixed bag. The two rejections were form letters with no feedback. The third reply included a request for an exclusive (which means I have to wait until my one outstanding partial review comes back with a yea or nay before sending off the pages to the new agent).
The agent who requested the partial did so after reading only my query letter, which is consistent with my conclusion that the letter is doing its job. Unfortunately the two agents who sent form rejections got the same query letter, without any sample pages. That bucks the nice trend I had going.
For those of you keeping track at home: 3 out of 3 requests for partial came from query letter only submissions. 6 out of 9 rejections came from queries with a letter and 5 or more sample pages. 1 out of 9 rejections came from queries with a letter and a synopsis. The remaining 2 out of 9 rejections came from standalone query letters.
The subject of genre came up in the comments on the last post. One of the agents who gave me a personal rejection suggested I should try writing something in Military Fantasy, since it might be an easier market to crack than Epic Fantasy right now.
OK. When an agent who says my writing is “much better than the usual unsolicited material I see” suggests a market, I’ll certainly take it under advisement. There’s only one problem. I’m not sure what MilFan is, exactly. It doesn’t show up in the genre glossary of any of my Writer’s Market books. I’ve seen Military Science Fiction and Heroic Fantasy (which is billed as the Fantasy equivalent of MilSciFi). Google searches come up with articles like this SFFWorld Forum discussion, or this LibraryThing Title List.
Unfortunately, I haven’t read any of those books. So here’s a question for my readers: What is Military Fantasy to you, and how would you distinguish it from Heroic, Epic, Contemporary, or Science Fantasy?
In other news, I’m still jobless. More time to write, then (every silver lining has a dark cloud, or something like that). I’ve been musing about writing a different form of story, something web bound, episodic, and interactive. I’ll let that ferment a bit and talk about it in another post sometime.
