Over the past couple of months, I’ve attended three conferences (one by Internet) that featured pitches or queries.  Friends asked for a summary. The summary grew longer than a blog post, so I made it into a page, here.

The summary covers some of what I learned.  The experience proved that the nexus of art and business is anything but clear, but it helped me understand that querying and pitching are much less about writing quality and much more about business.  The agent’s operative question, at least at first, is not, “Is this person a fine writer?” or “Is this story/character/plot captivating?”  It is, “Will this book sell?”  Nothing at all wrong with that, but it helps me write a better query.  As one presenter said, a good query letter induces the agent to ask for some/all of the manuscript (where that fine writing resides); the query/pitch is a business proposition.