Submitting in summer

Just submit your work when you're ready to do so. Agents are always busy, and will get to it as soon as they can.

There may be a slight drop in response as people go on long holidays over the summer but I don't think this is likely to be significant.

There could also be a lot more submissions made in summer, making workloads heavier, due to writers who work having time off in the summer to do more writing or focus more on building their professional presence. Given that I have noticed many writers are also teachers or university lecturers this would not be an unsurprising trend to note.

However, given that most submission turnarounds are measured in months it is irrelevant when you submit. It will get read eventually and the reading time will differ between publishers. Most commit to a schedule of sorts - telling you in the guidelines 'we will respond within X months of receiving your submission' but some don't and you can never be sure in those cases when to expect a response. It will depend on two major factors - the number of staff working on reading and evaluating the submissions and the number of submissions that company gets. A big company will likely have a lot more staff but will equally get a lot more submissions due to its higher profile. A small press may have one person assessing the submissions (and all the other work, that person being the entire 'company', though some are slightly larger than this) but will get a lot less submissions. How these two factors balance out will determine the response time.

I hope this isn't the case. I just started my querying last week! I think that if an agent is interested in a story, they will jump on it regardless of the weather/season. Good luck to you!

"When is the best/worst time to query?" is a FAQ around here. I couldn't possibly locate the thread, but the best answer came from, I believe James MacDonald and it ran something like,

Never query on Monday, as your query will be lost in the blizzard of mail that has come in all weekend. Of course, don't query on Fridays either because you'll get lost in that big Monday pile. Querying during the week is also bad because that's when agents are outrageously busy and apt to overlook your query. Querying in the summer is a no-no because everyone's on vacation; querying in the early fall is bad because everyone's just gotten back from vacation and they're too swamped to look at your letter. Then comes the fall, not too good as people are preparing for Thanksgiving. Then comes actual Thanksgiving, and people are prepping for Christmas and New Year's. Skip November and December altogether, and skip January because everyone's catching up on the previous two months. (it goes on, but you get the idea -- it is always the worst time to query. So query now, query often, query regardless.)

If you don't submit in the summer, your submission will come in behind those who do. And what happen if one of those submissions fills the only open slot an agent or editor had?

Time off may feel freeing, but while you're taking time off, other writers are still busy writing and submitting.

Miss Plum said:

"When is the best/worst time to query?" is a FAQ around here. I couldn't possibly locate the thread, but the best answer came from, I believe James MacDonald and it ran something like,

Never query on Monday, as your query will be lost in the blizzard of mail that has come in all weekend. Of course, don't query on Fridays either because you'll get lost in that big Monday pile. Querying during the week is also bad because that's when agents are outrageously busy and apt to overlook your query. Querying in the summer is a no-no because everyone's on vacation; querying in the early fall is bad because everyone's just gotten back from vacation and they're too swamped to look at your letter. Then comes the fall, not too good as people are preparing for Thanksgiving. Then comes actual Thanksgiving, and people are prepping for Christmas and New Year's. Skip November and December altogether, and skip January because everyone's catching up on the previous two months. (it goes on, but you get the idea -- it is always the worst time to query. So query now, query often, query regardless.)

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Exactly.

Okay, really, truly--starting in June my agent (in NY), and all the agents who work with her, and the rest of her office staff, work a 4-day week, and for my agent that shortened week seems to end around noon on Thursday, but her assistant still answers the phone till the end of the day.

It's not that she's not working, she's just not in the office. I'm pretty sure she spends a lot of her time out of the office reading mss. and schmoozing with editors. But the fact is, she is not in the office.

That's for June and July. August is pretty much a complete wash.

I work as an editor (not fiction) and everybody at my publishing house who has vacation time saved up gets out of the office in August. Some for the whole month, others who don't have as much time saved up for a week or two. Things are slow.

So while summer is not a bad time to send something, it is a time when maybe you'll have to wait a little longer for a response.

The other bad time is December, at least for NY agents & publishers. There are also a lot of industry things that knock out nearly whole months in the spring and fall. One of them is something in Frankfurt, but this isn't something the people in my office do so I'm a bit hazy on those details.

Just send it in. Someone will read it eventually.

Rhymes with Clue said:

Just send it in. Someone will read it eventually.

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Yes, and if you send it before another, you get read before that other writer.

That's a good question. I was wondering the same thing, too.

If you're ready to query, why would you ever wait? It's gotta go out sometime, the longer you wait, the longer until the six-figure advance shows up.

Jeff

I'm having the opposite experience. I've queried seven agents since July 14th, and I've heard back from five of them already, some the very next day. I was beginning to think submitting at this time of year was a great idea....but I guess it depends on who you are querying.

Sorry yours have been taking longer, but if it were me, I wouldn't give up or wait until summer is over. The longer you wait to submit, the longer you'll wait to hear back.