Submitting to more than one agent in an agency

Yes, unless it says so in the guidelines. Or usually when you get a rejection and if they say "we" it's the whole agency. If an agent says, "I'm going to pass" on to the next then.

Yeah, I've queried one agent and had ALL of them send me a response back on one email. So says the sig line anyway, lol. So if there's no guideline on their sites, definitely look at responses carefully before sending on to the next agent in the same place.

I'm always paranoid of being put on a "black list"

There are no black lists as such.

There are lists of writers who have proved difficult to deal with by which I mean confrontational to the point of dangerous, for example: calling-the-police difficult, rather than didn't-follow-our-guidelines difficult.

If you break a few rules but you're mostly there, your writing is brilliant, and you're polite and respectful, you have nothing to worry about.

Old Hack said:

There are no black lists as such.

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Repeating this for emphasis, because it's true.

- Victoria

The lists I mentioned are very much a limited thing, too: they're held by separate agencies and publishers, and are not circulated. So if you get onto one of the lists, then that is only really going to affect you at that agency.

And to get onto such a list you have to send threats and be hugely inappropriate on more than one occasion. I'm not talking about submitting in Comic Sans here: I'm talking about turning up on the agency's doorstep with a horse-head in a box.

I'm talking about turning up on the agency's doorstep with a horse-head in a box.

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So A chess set is an inapproprite gift for an agent?

sprogspasser said:

So A chess set is an inapproprite gift for an agent?

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Agents can't stand chess sets which represent the knight as a mere horse's head. They want the whole shebang.

But seriously. Any gift you give to an agent who doesn't already rep you could be viewed as a bribe.

Agents are looking for saleable MSS, not presents.

OP: I found that agencies that didn't want to receive a query more than once mentioned this in their guidelines. They were usually smaller agencies where it would be easy to pass on a query if it looked to interest a colleague.