Mr. Shayne estimated that he sent out 500 to 1,000 query letters over the last several years.
Students were supposed to come up with ideas for articles and develop sample query letters.
Sarah began researching French language schools, bombarding them with query letters and e-mail messages.
Ms. Stockett sent query letters to more than 45 agents before Susan Ramer of Don Congdon Associates in New York read the manuscript.
In the mid-'90s, as a fledgling writer, Ms. McCullah Lutz was "between two bad agents," living in Denver and sending query letters to Los Angeles film production companies.
He took some writing classes and for three years sent out query letters about his short stories until he found an agent.
"We get 6,000 query letters from writers we don't know, and they all get opened," said Jean V. Naggar, who runs a literary agency in New York.
"I sent out query letters to everyone associated with the Wayne's World franchise including producers, directors, writers, and actors," he writes.
Indeed, in an effort to find a publisher for his Harvard manuscript he developed an automated system that generated personalized query letters to more than 800 literary agents nationwide.
That usually gets me brainstorming, and soon I'm writing new query letters.
