Is batching queries a good strategy?

Hello!

This Advice Post is a bit different than others because I don’t know that I have the full picture of what it looks like for authors on the other side; I can only speak to how this works in my inbox.

This came up in a call recently, and I read about it in this post by Kailey Brennan DelloRusso on how she got her agent.

The query strategy of “batching” she’s describing in the post is sending out queries in batches starting not with your top choices but with some agents in the middle of your ranked list; based on their feedback, you can tweak your query materials and then go back to query a batch of your top choices (and then, I assume, work your way down your list?)

I know that querying writers “batch” in the sense that they send out 7 queries one day, 7 queries the next, etc; not what this post is about. I had always assumed that writers started with their top choices for agents and worked their way down that list.