You should head on over to my agent’s blog and read this:
http://theswivet.blogspot.com/2008/11/agent-stephen-barbara-on-great-american.html
Which muses on the death of the bad query, replaced with the perfect query and bad manuscript. Kind of interesting, and requires much food for thought. I must admit that I don’t spend too much time worrying about queries when I was shopping them around, and basically did two drafts (the second being a spelling/grammar check and sentence structure check) and very little planning before hand.
My work that I sent (excerpts, etc) I spent much more time in polishing. And I think it showed. But that’s not to say I completely ignored my queries at all. I’d just done them a lot. I sent a lot of bad queries in my days (I think the novel that landed me an agent was actually the sixth novel I’d sent out a shopping around), and I don’t think the point here is to ignore the query. But the point is the end novel is the most important thing, and it should be better, more polished and more professional than the query.
Or something like that. I just write the books. I don’t buy ‘em.
