You know you’re not supposed to start your letters with “Dear Editor,” need to follow proper formatting protocol, and should always send your queries to the correct person, right? You’ve no doubt also mastered the art of kicking out embarrassing grammar goof-ups, know more about your word process software than you do about your fiancé, and have learned the dangers of the begging routine (also known as the my-mom-thinks-it’s-fantabulous syndrome).

Why then, do most of your neatly-crafted, queries come boomeranging back from cyberspace?

Some more things to consider.

***

Blinded By Guidelines

Is following the guidelines a mistake? You bet it is. If you’re relying on them too much, that is. Writers, especially new writers, often assume that guidelines are the be-all, end-all, the ultimate resource on what a publication wants and what they should do to get an in. But frankly, it’s not always black-and-white.

Editors sometimes don’t look at their own guidelines for years, and I know I haven’t looked at the guidelines of most magazines I regularly write for in ages. The thing is, guidelines don’t really cover everything, and there’s a lot of important information they miss out on.

So if you read in a magazine’s guidelines, “No phone calls, faxes or e-mail queries,” and like every good writer, send postal mail, you may just be at a loss. Because these very editors will be handing out the highest paid assignments to your competitors by—you guessed it—phone, fax, and e-mail.

But why?

It’s simple, really. Editors don’t want to broadcast the fact that they’re open to queries by these methods because anyone who’s been an aspiring writer for more than eight seconds will be sending them ridiculous proposals that’ll never work. So they keep these options open for writers they know.

I’ve sent out snail mail queries a total of three times in my whole freelance writing career. That too, because my e-mail access broke down due to website errors and I was driving myself insane thinking about how many rejections this “minor mishap” was going to land me. I didn’t receive as much as an acknowledgement from the three editors. The next time I tried one of these magazines, it was by e-mail. And guess what? They gave me an assignment.

Oh, and just so you know—their guidelines say “no e-mail.”

Sometimes, when a magazine undergoes a complete makeover, the guidelines may not be revised immediately. Heck, I’ve seen magazines that haven’t updated their guidelines in years. So you end up proposing a 1,000-word feature when the magazine now only does 200-word shorts, or sending a personal essay where they’re only using humor.

More than guidelines, look at the actual magazine. And do refer to guidelines, but use them as an additional resource, not the only one.

***

Dump the “Formula”

I’ve said this before; I’ll say it again. You don’t have to stick to the same formula queries every time. Once you’ve learned the drill—hook, explanation, bio, closing—and achieved a considerable amount of success with it, move on. As you’ll see my sample queries and the bits and pieces of those I’ve shared already, you’ll find that many deviate from the traditional query letter format. Yours should, too.

Starting a query with a hook is fine, but what if you have thirty years of experience working in the industry the magazine focuses on? Wouldn’t it increase your chances if the editor knew that upfront? Or let’s say you’ve already got Tom Cruise on board for a tell-all interview because he’s a friend of your cousin’s wife’s sister’s boyfriend’s ex-roommate from college. Wouldn’t it be more likely for you to get the assignment if the editor knew, right there, in the first paragraph that this was a sure-shot deal?

***

A One, and a Two …

Like fashion trends, where one color is “in” or “out” by seasons, the advice on how many pages a query letter should be also goes “in” and “out” by seasons. And like fashion trends, it’s something I just don’t understand. At the beginning of the Internet era, short, snappy, to-the-point was in vogue. So professional writers advised sending out one-page query letters. You either wrote a page, no more, no less, or you were doomed to the death of your magazine writing career.

Then suddenly a couple of writers discovered that despite short attention spans brought on by the Internet, longer query letters still worked. News was spread. The community rejoiced. Two-page and longer query letters were here to stay.

Me, I missed all the action. I continued sending in e-mail pitches without worrying about whether I was exceeding some imaginary word-limit and bagged regular assignments. Now that I look back on those successful pitches, I’m still not able to come up with a standard for you. Some were long, because I just had too much information crammed into my brain and I thought the editor might appreciate how much research I could do. In others, a couple of sentences did the trick. Maybe those editors were tricked into thinking I’d be able to fit more information in a less number of words and they’d get away with buying so much more by paying less. Or maybe, just maybe, I’m a good writer, and it didn’t matter how long my query letter was, as long as I was able to get and keep my editor’s attention.

If you’re rambling on just to get to two pages, forget it. The padding will be visible. Similarly, don’t try to cram all your information in one page. Take the space you need to tell your story completely.

Whether you’re bordering on one page or two, let the words flow. An editor’s not going to stop reading an interesting pitch simply because it exceeded a page limit. Oops, longer than one page, gotta stop reading.

Say what you need to, then shut up.

***

The Fact-Checker’s Nightmare

Some mistakes are excusable. You know, forgetting the “n” in insomnia, or writing “there” instead of “their.” Everyone does it from time to time, and as long as the rest of your work is coherent and devoid of grammatical inaccuracies and spelling mistakes, you’re good to go.

No, it’s those other mistakes that cause a problem. Like getting your facts muddled up and calling Harlan Coben a romance writer, or talking about Pakistan in the 1920s. That’s where the editor sees that this writer has no clue what she’s blabbering on about and is likely to have an article falling apart at the hands of a fact-checker.

Make sure you’ve done your research well before you actually send the query. If an editor calls you with an assignment, she’s expecting you to be the expert and answer her questions on the subject. If you’ve left a major portion of your research for later, she’s not going to be much satisfied with your answers. This doesn’t mean you have to get a Ph.D. on the subject, just that you need to have enough information to be able to intelligently talk about the scope of your piece. The more thorough your research, the better your chances of first landing the assignment, and then doing it fabulously.

***

Caught in a Time Warp?

When writers would send me queries for WritersCrossing.com, they would sometimes include a time element. It usually ran along the lines of “If I don’t hear from you within a month, I’ll assume you can’t use the idea,” or “I can have this article ready within a week.” That’s fine, and as long as they were on my regular e-mail list, I would usually get back to them even sooner. But sometimes, I’d have a busy streak, and I’d decide to put all the queries and submissions in a folder to be looked at later and assigned in one go.

Now consider this: if three weeks later, I see an idea that catches my attention but has a time factor in it, I’ll know that I have a 50-50 chance of using it since the writer may already have pitched it elsewhere. Since I already have a pile of more queries, I’ll fall back on this one only if I don’t find anything else to fill my spaces. That may or may not happen, cutting this writer’s chances substantially.

In a national magazine, you can count on it not happening.

Most editors can live with a deadline if it’s in a follow-up e-mail, but if you’re contacting an editor for the first time, it could be months before the editor even sees your e-mail. If you’ve given her a deadline, you’re almost definitely bringing a rejection upon yourself. Talk about aiming at the stars and shooting in the foot.

What about the writer who thinks she can have the article ready in a week? Now I’m no skeptic, and have written fabulous articles within hours myself, but if the article is research-heavy, I tend to think, “Really?”

One persistent woman would send me an e-mail every day after I’d given her an assignment, to tell me exactly when the article would be in. She did this for three days before I finally asked her to contact me only when it was ready. As I had anticipated, the article arrived after deadline, was below quality, and wound up getting rejected.

Was this woman a bad writer? Nope. Her query was one of the best I’d ever seen!

The problem was, she needed way more time to whip the article into shape than her self-imposed deadline gave her. The thing is, I didn’t even need the article for a few more weeks; I was working on my own schedule and would happily have given her a longer deadline.

And that’s not the only problem with the “I can send you this article within a week” sort of pitch. Sure you can. You know this. Even I’ll grudgingly acknowledge this with a bit of envy. But unless you’re working with a news magazine, speed does not work in your favor. Let the editor dictate lead times and deadlines. Give her the option of making the final call. And don’t shoot yourself in the foot by getting less time when you could indeed have worked with much more.