When you are happy with your log line, query letter, and a good database of contacts for agents and publishers, you are ready to start submitting query letters. There are basically two ways of delivering your query letter; email and regular mail. When I first began contacting agents and publishers, the cost of printing manuscripts and postage didn’t justify the cost and time spent, so unless they specify no email submissions in their guidelines, I would email them.

This said, if you are not going to send out a huge quantity of email queries at once, then consider sending a letter by snail mail. It may stand out and become more effective since most people use email. I always keep all the contacts that I have collected on an Excel spreadsheet and you can use MS Word's Mail Merge function to create a professional, eye-catching letter with a proper heading and address for each company on it, making your letter look a lot less like a generic letter. I strongly advise writing the agent's contact name and address by hand; again this adds a personal touch and the response rate is better.
 

Email is by far the cheapest way to send out query letters. But be mindful not to send out a large number at once, especially if you have a free email account with Yahoo, Gmail or Hotmail as they could terminate your account, so stagger the query letters or they will think you are sending spam.You're going to get turned down and ignored the majority of the time, but do not let it deter you. You must keep focused on your end goal. A response rate of 2% is a great result. So for every 100 query letters you send, getting 2 replies is doing very well. I would recommend starting out with 200 queries to measure the effectiveness of your submission and if the response is good, then step it up and do a massive email blast. You do not want to alienate publishers with inferior submissions and ideas. So measure the response rate and make rewrites if needed.

I have over 600 agents and managers and over 1000 producers in my database so with some work, hopefully you can build a database that large, too, to really give your manuscript a wide reach. So you need to build your database up to a sizeable number of publisher and agent contacts, and you need to email each contact several times with each new manuscript you have. Obviously, you'll want to respect their time and if they ask you not to contact them again, you have to respect that. In my experience, this seldom happens if your query looks professional.

Finally, if you are confident selling yourself over the telephone, why not accumulate a database of telephone numbers for publishers. I have known many writer find great success this way, because not many writers, including myself, will try this method. You could also, if money is not a factor, hire a professional sales person to make the call on your behalf.