Covers and Credits (like D&D only it stings more when your characters die)

I just wrote this in regards to a question about queries and not having any professional writing credits:

It's _always_ incredibly difficult to land an agent. But the writing credits issue has very little to do with it. It's something that's very hard to believe when you're first starting out (I certainly had enough trouble getting it into my head) but credits have almost zero impact on acceptances. 99.9999 percent of the time the story gets accepted or doesn't based on its own merits and the cur