Response After Proposal

jilymich said:

I have sent 7 agents my non-fiction proposal, after they requested it from my query. How long do agents usually take to respond?

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It could take anywhere from a few days to a few months. But if you don't hear within a month or two I might consider sending a little polite email asking how things are going and if they read it.

I had one agent who was reading my proposal but he never got back to me, so after a month I sent another email. Then I had another agent who checked my proposal out over a weekend.

There's so many factors, it's hard to give you an answer.

My agent got back to me in a day. The other agent's I queried took over two to four months to get back to me with rejections. So ya never know. If I had all the money in the world, I'd hire an inventor to figure out a way to make a rejectometer that way we could see, kinda like the barometer, what the likelihood of a rejection was that day. Good luck!

Check out the agents websites (if they have one). Usually, they state their turnaround time. If you can't find that information, consider waiting three months before following up.

For emailed proposals I had most of my responses within a week. For snailmailed proposals a little longer. I included 3 sample chapters with mine so I thought the responses were fairly quick. I think my agent was the fastest (if they're interested they get back fairly quickly). She read it in a couple of days and requested a phonecall before offering representation. Another agent who offered representation the same day had the proposal about 5 days.

Response times in this situation range from minutes to never. Query more and write more.