Prologues

I have discovered from speaking with many agents at the Backspace Conference that as a general rule, agents despise prologues.  They will tell you that unless the prologue is absolutely positively essential to the plot of the story, drop it.  It seems that historical fiction is the one genre in which prologues sometimes make sense, but still only sparingly.

The other lesson is that when sending out a query and the first x pages to an agent, sending the prologue does not make sense because it usually does not involve the main characters of the book and might have a very different style than in the real story.

For my book CROSSING THE WILDERNESS, I had written a prologue.  I love the prologue, and I believe it is helpful in giving the reader a sense of what my alternate history world is all about.  But I now know not to send it out to agents - I will start with chapter 1.