"U.S. (one of the agents) said he gets 42,000 emails a year,” says a young man in the elevator this morning.  “He said I can send him a query, but what’s the point, at those odds?”

Well … I wonder about this. The truth is, it sounds worse than it is, as long as you have your act together. I mean, yes, there are 42,000 emails coming in, but let's remember some of those are from Mr. Kwame Mensath or a Canadian pharmacy. And of the actual queries,  many are from writers who aren’t yet ready for publication; many others are pitching projects that are outside the agent’s stated areas of expertise. And you’re going to have to face it, the only way an agent can tell whether a project is worthwhile is by actually looking at your work. We're not like Lana Turner; we cannot be discovered conclusively at a drug store, because what we've got to offer is words, not images.

I worry about the young writers getting their manuscript requested this weekend being upset when they realize that these agents have requested many manuscripts, and will probably take on one or two clients a year from the conferences they attend. And that’s as it has to be: just because someone cleans up pretty nice and speaks well at a writer’s conference pitch session does not make them the compiler of a fully-polished 75,000 word manuscript. 

So … a possible problem of this conference? It encourages you to query before you should.  “What’s your project?” I ask the young man.

“A Sci-Fi thriller,” he says. 

“Well, you know … “ I begin, but the elevator doors thrust open before I can tell him that for starters he has to query agents who do his type of work, and U.S.isn't a sci-fi specialist  … and to choose one genre, sci-fi or thriller, and stick with it ... read agent and editor blogs like Nathan Bransford  ... join a workshop. Another writer began to talk to him as the doors closed, but I was worried.

At our conference, I will tell Steve, we need sessions that will give more direction to beginning writers.  I mean, to reference my own blog, Writers Write!