Problem with Queries? Help please

[BlancheKing]

I was going through my queries and I realized something. Of the queries I sent out, all the ones I pasted pages into were silent. Every query I sent out without pages pasted in replied (yes or no). According to the agents websites and query tracker, all of these silent agents do send rejection letters, and fairly quickly too (within hours/ days).

So here's my question: does yahoo have a glitch or something? Because it can't be a coincidence that the only silent agents are the ones who received pages. Shouldn't there be at least a form rejection or something from them?

[Bryan Russell/Ink]

I wouldn't worry too much. Your sample size is very small. Agents get busy. (And you did paste the five pages into the main email, right? Queries with attachments will usually get deleted).

Ink

[Krista G.]

BlancheKing, I TOTALLY understand your paranoia. However, I use Yahoo and haven't had that problem. So maybe they're just taking a bit longer to respond at the moment. Have you checked out Query Tracker to get response times in the past 30 days?

You might try pasting pages into an e-mail and sending it to another e-mail account of yours, just to see how it looks, and to see if it gets kicked into the spam folder. And if all else fails, you can always follow up with the agents in a reasonable amount of time.

[d minus]

It might just be the dreaded "no response" response.

I got a bunch of nothing, when it appeared others were getting quick form rejections. (Quick form rejects can be anything, though. Some people query agents who don't rep their genre, and that's an easy no. Thus, QT can be misleading, discouraging, infuriating.)

I understand that agents get a lot of queries and it's impossible to answer all of them, and I actually don't mind when agents state clearly on their websites that "No response after 2 weeks means no thanks." But when agents don't have this clause stated on their website, and they send form rejections out to others (for whatever reason), it's frustrating.

I guess it's a good idea to cap these at 28 days. If they don't answer in 4 weeks, it's a definite no. I've only had one agent take longer than 28 days, with a personalized rejection, no less, at 40 days... by that time I was already over it.