I thought I’d check in with you all, as I’ve been “in the query trenches,” as I’ve seen some writers put it, for almost six months now.
But before I dive into my experience, I want to talk a little bit about what agents do, why I’m pursuing this route, and what the process entails.
Literary agents are a relatively recent phenomenon in the publishing world. As more and more people wrote, publishers grew more and more overwhelmed with the manuscripts sent to them for consideration. Add in the ease of sending things electronically, rather than via the mail or meeting in person, and suddenly the editors had more books than they could read, let alone edit and publish. Reading submissions is only a portion of an acquisition editor’s job. So literary agents came into being. They were a way to funnel a smaller portion of manuscripts to publishers.
Literary agents are par for the course, nowadays. Most publishing houses don’t even accept unsolicited (not asked for) or unagented submissions for consideration. An agent’s role is two-fold: they find and sign clients (authors) and, in many cases, provide editorial feedback and other aid in the author establishing their career, and they also find publishers and submit to editors, generally serving as a go-between and helping negotiate contracts. They leverage their experience and network on the author’s behalf.
The querying process, as a result, is long, complicated, and where a lot of the . . . slog, for lack of a better term, has ended up. Why do I call it a slog? Consider this: In 2022, over 4 million new books were published. Over half of that number is estimated to be self-published titles (not published by a publishing house). And when you factor in things like textbooks, it’s a smaller number than you might think. But for each one of those million plus books published, there are countless more that were rejected. I’ve seen agents on social media open to submissions, only to receive hundreds, or even a thousand, queries in only a week or two. There is no shortage of people writing and trying to sell books.
So querying can feel like an insurmountable obstacle. How do you make yourself stand out in a sea of thousands of other writers, who are just as talented, just as determined, just as hungry for a contract? (That’s a real question, and if anyone has any insight, I’m all ears.) It mostly comes down to persistence. I don’t mean just sending query after query. I mean persistence is planning out your approach, preparing your material, seeking out feedback, researching the agents that represent what you write and provide what you need. Persistence in the face of inevitable rejection and backwards-sliding. Persistence in knowing that an agent can request part, or even all of your manuscript and still be just as likely to say no. Persistence in knowing that agents say no for a variety of reasons that you should never take personally.
Ok, Kate, you might be thinking. That’s all interesting information, but we want to know what querying has been like for you. Have you found an agent? Are you going to be published anytime soon?!
Oh, if only it were that easy. And, just as a heads up, publishing is a long business (I don’t want to say slow because it’s very busy at every stage, but it can feel slow). At my job, we’re already working on books coming out next summer. So even if I had an agent tomorrow, it would still be a while before I was published.
But that’s enough stalling on my part! Here’s where I’m at. In the last 6-ish months, I’ve sent out 24 queries. I’ve gotten 8 rejections, had 2 that have passed the expected response time (so I’m considering them rejections), and am waiting to hear back from 13 others. Those of you who like math may have caught a discrepancy there, right? I’m one short? That’s because I’ve had one agent ask for a larger sample than the query provides! Which, even if it doesn’t end in an offer, is very reassuring to me. It means my work was interesting enough to someone that they wanted to see more, out of all the hundreds of queries that crossed their desk. And I count that as an honor.
I know I have a more optimistic outlook on querying than a lot of authors I see on social media and hear about. I don’t know if that’s because I work in publishing and have a different point of view, or because I tend to be a very pragmatic person, or because I haven’t been doing this for years like some of them. But I’m going to keep that outlook as long as I can manage it.
What are my plans moving forward? Well, I’m going to wait for this batch of queries to be answered (I sent about half of them in the last month after revising my query material). At that point, I’ll reassess whether I want to keep querying, take some time to revise again before restarting, or if I want to wait until my next project is done and start querying with it instead.
But that enough of my rambling. Let me know if you have questions about querying.
Until next time, word nerds!
Kate G. Jameson 