Hi again. Finally broke through the rest of my June queries yesterday. I got a little behind because of a vacation around the holiday, but I'm just about caught up to my 2 weeks response time. I'm sure I'll be behind again by next week. 

At least we spoke in May, my volume was down, with only about 261 queries. This month we're back up a bit. But my request rate is lower again. Mostly I have been really busy, and my list is pretty full, so I'm pickier again.

• Total: 297
• Requested: 3
• Categories of Requested:  All YA - 2 contemporary,  1 dystopian/fantasy
• Queries with attachments: only 2!

A word on that last point: Please don't send attachments unless I ask for it. I'm just not downloading something I'm not interested in. 

AUTHOR/ILLUSTRATORS: A few of you have been pasting images in the body of the email. This also slows me down a lot. One email was so heavy loaded with big files, I could barely scroll down. Annoying. I ask for a link to your online portfolio and website. This is easier. 

Two other weird syndromes struck my slush pile this month. First, I got a few of those queries from third parties, that is where the person sending the query is NOT the person who wrote the book. So either authors are hiring someone to do this for them (are you kidding? don't do that), or they had some weird manager on board. One of them looked to be some a small-time film agent of sorts. Basically, I auto-reject these. I want to hear from the real person.

The other one was a string of queries that were all three shades to the left of believable. Like with a little more imagination they could have been spam. They all tended to be adult non-fiction of various kinds (self-help...dating advice...health...), none of which I really represent. And they were ALL formatted exactly the same way. I'm willing to think that maybe there was a batch of people who were all following advice from a single source. Either way, it seems to have stopped, so I'm not worried. But I definitely got a whiff of spam.

And otherwise, it was a lot of the usual tropes. I've been noticing a lot of school plays, Egyptian myth, Mayan lore, etc. Tons and tons of teens with varying degrees of psychic abilities. Nothing that was exciting me all that much, but...we'll keep going!