I recently met a local (fellow Eastern Connecticut) author who has published a few novels through this company; it's a very small publishing house that takes unagented genre manuscripts. She writes mainly High Fantasy, but they also deal in pulp mysteries, Westerns and sci-fi. From what she told me it sounds as though they have their good and bad points, so I was wondering if anyone here has had any experiences with them that they would share.

I'm looking for books or (in-depth links; I haven't had much luck finding anything but the most basic of information) on the history of women in the NYPD, specifically mid-twentieth century, if available. Can anyone help? Thanks in advance.

A few days ago I wrote the following in my work in progress:
[suspicious]"He has his finger on the pulse of the city, even if he's only waiting for it to expire so he can steal its watch"[/suspicious]
...and can't help thinking this sounds familiar (and too funny) to be an original thought. Anyone recognize this phrase or something very like it from an existing work? I ran it through one of those plagiarism checker tools and it came up OK, but the tool in question appears to be for non-fiction works such as school assignments and may not have fiction in its database. Can anyone help?

I'm considering social media as a means of advertising my book, and was wondering if anyone here or someone you know has experience of this and whether you would recommend it. Pros and cons? Would it be advisable to create the page "in character" as my protagonist, or as myself? Business or personal? Suggestions, please!

OK, this is probably really dumb, but how do I change the length/size of the tab indent at the beginning of a paragraph?  I need to reduce it from 8 spaces to 3 and would like to do it to an entire text without having to go through the entire thing and do it manually.  I managed to do it once but can't figure out how I did it.  (I don't want to change the margin size.)  Thanks!

...fanfic edition:
http://wtffanfiction.tumblr.com/

It was a terrible connection and I could barely understand the woman on the other end, but she claimed to be from a company called "Bookwhirl" that does marketing of self-published works, and was offering me her services.  The whole thing sounded a bit fishy to me, and as I said, I could hardly understand a word, so I finally gave up and told the caller to just email me the information.
Anyhoo...I looked the company up on Absolute Write and it turns out they are Asian-based scammers (though they claim to be from Wisconsin) and charge what I consider exorbitant fees to create websites, blog pages, and so on.  Needless to say, I won't be using their "services".  Anyone here heard of this company or been called by them?

I currently have a manuscript ready to shop around to agents and have some concerns; hopefully someone who has experience with this process can advise me:

-It's the first volume in a projected series, so would it be advisable for me to have a couple of sequels written and ready to go before I even consider querying agencies?  I only ask because Jim has mentioned this as something that went a long way toward getting The Dresden Files published.  (I do have a partial rough draft of Book Two.)

-When an agency's web site says "multiple submissions okay", to what are they referring?  That it's okay to send your query to more than one agent at the company?  That it's okay to send queries for more than one manuscript to the agency?  Or that it's okay to send your query to other agencies at the same time?  (Speaking of the latter, do some/most/all agents have issues with this?)

-Every agency seems to have different expectations of what constitutes a "good" query letter; for example, one agency I'm considering posted examples of letters that had sold recent manuscripts to them, most of which would almost certainly have been rejected by Query Shark as vague and unengaging (and the one letter that garnered HUGE praise on QS broke all the rules.)  Is it recommended to tailor one's query to the specific agency, or send the same one to multiple agents?

-Would someone here with experience in the field be willling to vet my query letter when I get it written (I'll PM you when the time comes.)

-Am I way over-thinking this?