Book Query review

[supery00n]

I’ve been working on a book for the last few months, and I just submitted the query for the book to six agents who I found on AgentQuery.com. Based on a first impression, do you think that the agents would reply with a request for a proposal, or would not?

Here’s the query. (I left the personal bio paragraph out.)

In Atlantis: The Underworld, I present the novel hypothesis that the island-continent of Atlantis as described by two dialogues of Plato, namely the Critias and the Timaeus, was in actuality the once dry and fertile Caribbean Basin, and that its destruction was a result of the Atlantic Ocean breaching what was previously a continuous and uninterrupted mountain chain that until then had supported the weight of the entire Atlantic Ocean much as a dam supports the weight of its reservoir above, in the process engulfing the Caribbean Basin and transforming it into the Caribbean Sea overnight, leaving only the broken remnants of the once continuous mountain range that today form the Caribbean archipelago, the deep waterways between adjacent islands having been carved down by the torrents of ocean water that poured into the basin from the ocean, forever submerging the Caribbean Underworld in a watery grave.
Almost everyone has heard of Atlantis, that continent that purportedly existed in the Atlantic Ocean home to a fabulously wealthy kingdom that was destroyed by earthquakes and floods unleashed by the gods. The veracity of Plato’s account, which was related to Solon by Egyptian priests in the city of Sais circa 600 BC, and thence to several other people and finally to himself, has been a matter of intense debate among scholars over the two millennia, and in the general public since Ignatius Donnelly’s bestselling Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, which made a compelling argument for a hitherto unknown civilization in the Atlantic Ocean from which many of the world’s traditions, religions, and arts of civilization shared a common ancestral origin. Donnelly located Atlantis along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which in the late 19th century was being surveyed in detail for the first time by American and European ships, and claimed that the island groups such as the Azores, Madeira, and Canaries were the remnant mountain peaks of the island-continent whose remainder had sunk beneath the depths of the Atlantic Ocean. Unfortunately, Donnelly’s location hypothesis was found to be untenable in the light of new advances and theories of geology in the 20th century as well as more detailed surveys of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and the present consensus of the location of Atlantis falls into two main classes, one being places in the Mediterranean region, the most common being the island of Thera in the Aegean Sea, with Spain trailing as a distant second, and the other being in the Caribbean region, especially around the island of Bimini in the Bahamas and off the westernmost tip of Cuba. The key distinction between my hypothesis and these recent location hypotheses placing Atlantis somewhere in the Caribbean Sea is first, that I contend that the entire Caribbean Basin and not merely a specific part of it was the continent of Atlantis, and second, I have performed extensive surveying of the Caribbean seafloor using remote sensing tools, and found numerous examples of structures, one of which I believe is the irrigation system comprised of the network of ditches and canals, which I found to extend as far as 20,000 feet below sea level, mentioned in Plato’s account of Atlantis. This, and numerous other findings, new insights from classical texts, as well as connections between the flooding of the Caribbean Basin and Noah’s Flood, my hypothesis that the massive death of plants and animals in the Underworld upon its flooding by the Atlantic Ocean and the ensuing bacterial biomass decay was the primary cause of the spike in CO2, forcing up the global temperature and melting ice sheets in the Northern hemisphere over a few thousand years, the possibility of the mass redistribution of water on the Earth’s surface due to the flooding of the Caribbean basin triggering a rapid polar wandering event that in turn, caused global flooding on an even more destructive scale than the flooding of Atlantis itself, and the likely existence of a 12,000 year old Athens and its destruction contemporaneous with that of Atlantis constitute some of the themes and topics that I will address.

Thanks.

[Lasciel]

That’s a really hard question to answer, as we don’t know where you submitted the book, what the agents’ fields of publication are, and how your submission stacks up against other potential competition.

Sorry, but without more information, this isn’t really a question with any possible factual answer.

[Colibri]

Let’s move this over to Cafe Society for the literati to comment upon.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

[Exapno_Mapcase]

You are pitching the book as an academic thesis. That may be what it is. If so, you will not find agents likely to respond because they don’t normally work with university presses (no advances).

The problem for you with university presses is that they seldom reward 22-year-old students with contracts. For that matter, agents will check your qualifications first thing. If you aren’t a subject matter expert with a professorship they’ll want to know what qualifies you to write a book, i.e. whether they can sell you on the media. There may be something. You may be a pretty blonde. You might be related to Jacques Costeau.

If you want to make this a commercial book, buy or check the library for the many books on how to write a nonfiction proposal. There are many parts to it beyond the one-page query letter and you will need to have those ready if any agent should respond. These books stress the marketing aspects of proposals which are unfortunate realities today. I strongly recommend doing this kind of research before preceding.

You should also know that because of the Internet, most agents receive 200 or more queries a day. They are swamped. Many no longer even acknowledge queries, not even to reject them, except for the tiny, tiny few they want to see more on. Remember that even a request for a full proposal is only a nibble, not a guarantee. It’s a rough business.