Literary Agent Response Times
An agent asked for your full manuscript! How exciting! What’s next? In this video, you can learn how to handle the sometimes unpredictable waiting period to hear back from a literary response agent.
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Literary Agent Response Times Transcript
Hello, this is Mary Kole with Good Story Company. I am recording this video in December. And this is the perfect time to talk about a very hot topic which is literary agent response times, everybody's favorite. So, literary agent response times are all over the map. Agents are phenomenally busy. And one of the things that writers maybe don't realize is that they're not just sitting there in their slush pile. They are evaluating existing client manuscripts, giving notes if they're editorial agents, they're going out on submissions, they're negotiating contracts, they are keeping up with the industry. They are pitching to foreign agents or movie people. They do a bajillion things for their existing clients. And sometimes the slush, the acquisition of new clients is sort of a weekend and evenings type of activity for them. So, they're not just sitting there in the office looking at their slush piles.
When I was an agent, I wish that was the case, but I spent maybe probably 5 to 10% of my time looking at slush and that was often extracurricular time. So, literary agents are very, very busy people and the job is a commission-based sales job based on sales that they achieve. So, they are working on manuscripts that have a higher chance of selling, which is their client manuscripts, they're already represented manuscripts while also keeping an eye on the sort of wild card that's in the slush pile which is, sure, there's source of potential revenue down the line, but sometimes it can be you can spend a whole day in the slush and not find anything or you bid on something and it goes to another agent. So, the slush is very much a wild card, and agents some are gamblers, some are not. So, that depends on personality as well when they determine how much time they wanna spend on the slush pile any given day or week.
Now, there are some very slow periods in publishing. There are publishing trade shows every year and they're different for the sort of area of publishing that your ideal agent, ideal publisher is in. So, for example, in March or April is the Bologna Children's Book Fair which affects children's publishing, which is the world that I came from. And so if you query during Bologna, you're probably not gonna get a lot of responses because you're having a lot of people out of office while they're off in Italy eating gelato and talking about books, obviously, but mostly gelato. And the same can go for other big trade shows like Book Expo America, all of the American Booksellers Association, American Library Association trade shows, the Frankfurt Book Fair. These sort of... These happen a lot throughout the calendar year, so it's impossible to sort of type your submission to a book fair, but know that they happen a lot, they affect big swaths of the publishing industry and people are not really as responsive especially to slush pile submissions during those times.
In terms of the speed of the publishing industry, in general, summers tend to be slower although everybody says that, "I thought summers weren't supposed to be slow." They're definitely picking up speed. We have downtime in August, a lot of people are on vacation. Now, if the publishing side of things slows down and that happens in usually August and the time between Thanksgiving and New Year's, that means agents slow down as well because a lot of their editors that they're pitching to are out on vacation or acquisitions are slow because agents are pitching but editors are saying, "Hey, my pub director or my marketing director, my sales director is out of town right now. I can't give you the green light for this project because they have checks and balances internally in publishing as well." So, it may not be the agent's fault. It may... You know, it's nobody's fault that the calendar has these peaks and these valleys, but it may also be on the publishing side of things. So, if the publisher has a trade show that they need to appear at if they have sales deadlines or their publishing season is turning over and they need to do a lot of presentations on their new titles, things slow down on and off throughout the year.
So, one specific area that I really would avoid submitting during is this time right now during the shooting of this video which is from Thanksgiving to New Year's because we have a lot of holidays, we have all kinds of faiths have holidays during this time, and you're just...your odds of hitting an and out of office increase exponentially. An agent's odds of hitting an and out of office on the publishing side increase exponentially and so agents take this time to either catch up on work, catch up on sleep, catch up on eating and feeding themselves and their families. Not a lot of work tends to get done during this time. You may hear back on submissions during this time, that means the agent is taking this holiday to catch up, but even if you get scooped up during this moment, you may not necessarily go out on submission until the new year until agents know that publishers are sort of back at their desks and ready... Cat alert. Ready to give the new year a try and are feeling energized. So, that's literary agent response times throughout the year.
Now, individual agents also have their own response times and these are either published somewhere or they are not. And you hear about it may be on QueryTracker or AgentQuery. People can leave comments on forums especially like QueryTracker where they say, like, "Oh, this person is taking forever," or, "Oh, this person posts on Twitter that they're all caught up with queries and I never heard back from mine." So, agents do get feedback unofficially on their response times in writing forums. This is also where you hear about things like an agent closing to submissions or an agent opening to submissions after a long while. You can also hear about those things that affect literary agent response times, on their Twitter feeds, on their blogs, on their agency websites. Which brings me to be official response times. Some agents published these, some do not. Every single literary agent has an online presence. This behooves them greatly because they're looking for talent. They are looking for the people that are gonna be submitting to them and they want to keep them up to speed. They also wanna standardize their queries and sort of set expectations so that they don't hear a bunch of questions like, "How do I submit to you?" and, "How often do you respond?" and all of that.
So, a good agent and agency website practice is to have submission guidelines posted either individually for each agent or as an agency sort of one blanket policy that all the agents follow. Some agencies have a mix of this, like they'll have official agency submission guidelines, but then every... Either every single agent has their own guidelines or one or two agents at the agency have specific guidelines. So, looking at every single agent that you hope to submit to, will really help you figure out literary agent response times for each. Now, if they do publish a response time, it'll be something like, "I respond to every query within eight weeks if I'm interested," or, "I respond to every query within six weeks, whether I'm interested or not." So, if you don't hear within the posted timeframe, it's okay to check in. Now, a lot of people will say, you know, it's between six to eight weeks is, I would say an industry-standard expectation for response time. Some agents run a lot faster, some run slower. Some agencies run faster, some run slower. If they have it posted, again, you can check in if you haven't heard back.
Now, a lot of agents have the policy of, "If you don't hear from me, that's a no. I'm sorry." They only respond when they're interested. So, that does mean it's less likely that your submission was lost. It's more likely then that that's their way of passing on the submission if you don't hear back. However, if an agent does say, "I respond to everything," and you don't hear within their posted guideline, you can check in. I would say that the realities of the industry, unfortunately, have made it so that not every agent responds to submissions even if it's a decline which is a rejection. A lot of agents are taking now this policy of responding only if they're interested, and that is unfair to writers, I would say. I completely understand it from the backend because if you have 40,000 emails to answer per year, you are not gonna be able to wade your way through all of those especially some that don't meet the submission guidelines or say, "Dear Agent." instead of being personalized. You don't wanna waste your time responding to those types of emails because the writer did not invest a lot of time in their submission. So, I completely understand that not every agent is going to respond to everything, but it is a little unfortunate for the writer because it leaves them hanging. You know, they hang out for eight weeks wondering if they're gonna hear back, and then they just don't, and there's no sense of closure. But unfortunately, more and more agents are going this way in their responses.
So, I would say there's a lot of information out there unofficially in writing forums and officially on literary agent websites that detail literary agent response times. It's a little bit of extra research for you, but it's also good peace of mind so you know exactly what's happening with your submission. I would recommend tracking everything in a spreadsheet. I can share a Google Doc spreadsheet that I use in the links for this video, which might be very, very helpful for you to sort of keep an eye on what's happening with all of your submissions at their various places where they've ended up. But, yeah. Avoid the holidays and try and see if anybody has the response time posted. Those are two main takeaways from this video. My name is Mary Kole with Good Story Company and here’s to a good story.
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