As promised yesterday, here’s what not to do when querying a novel.

I speak from experience since I did all these things three years ago when querying my first novel (note: this novel never sold).

• Don’t change from third-person point of view to first-person point of view in one week while querying.

• Don’t email back agents who have the third-person point of view version and ask if they’d like to see the first-person one.
• Don’t mail the manuscript to an agent and then two days later frantically overnight her the newly revised and improved version to please read instead.
• Don’t send the first 100 pages to awesome, classy agent and then send her revised version five days later, then re-revised version ten days later.
• Don’t ask when your third-person version gets rejected if the agent would be interested in considering the first-person version.
• Don’t query Big Deal Literary Agency head while you’re in the middle of changing your book from third person to first person because she might write right back right away and want to see it and then you’ll have to push her off three more days til you finish your sloppy rewrite to first person that you never should have sent then anyway and isn’t it so obvious why the agency rejected you back then?
• Don’t write five-paragraph response to five-paragraph rejection from fancy boutique agency trying to convince the agent to read the rest of your manuscript. Sure, she wrote a five-paragraph rejection, but she can’t be swayed. Just move on.

In short, take the time to finish your novel and sit on it before you send it out. Then again, I learned a lot from this process, so maybe you should just do whatever works for you!

And for the final piece in this series, come back tomorrow for some tips on what works!