What do you do when you e-mail queries to agents and wait for weeks on end for them to respond? I fired some stuff off in early May and heard nothing back yet...
Silence and non-response really irks me, but I go to lengths to find out if they normally email back with rejects, comments or whatever. If it qualifies for a nudge, give 'em one but wait a sufficient amount of time. If nothing, then Move along, there's nothing to see here.
Yeah, I don't think I would nudge on just a query alone. Now if the agent requested your work and you've been waiting to hear back for a set period of time, then by all means nudge.
Eight weeks isn't much in publishing time. Of course, if these are all no response means no agencies that usually respond quickly, I'd probably re-think my query letter and/or my manuscript. Before I sent the query off to more agents.
Oh, and I'd probably be refreshing my email 18 times a day hoping for something. Good news, bad news, anything!
You can also check Query Tracker and see if other people got a response or not and how long it usually takes. A lot of agents don't respond with rejections anymore, but you can see that if it's a request they'll usually respond within a week or something along those lines. You can also read the comments to see if other people have actually gotten responses or if they're writing them off after a time.
How many did you send? If you've sent ten or fifteen and haven't gotten a request, it's probably worth it to think about revising the query.
I hear ya. I'm trying to keep busy working on the next book and all, but I've gotten to the point where that inbox silence is so deafening, I'm actually longing for the rejections to start trickling in, so I can at least officially get closure on some of those submissions! (And, no, not all of those are "no answer = no" type agencies/agents.)
Some agencies are explicit about not responding to rejected queries. Others say they respond, but then never do. Some tell you exactly how long to wait before inquiring about a query.
I would nudge agencies that invite it by telling you when to nudge. Otherwise, I'd just mark an agent as a NRR (no response rejection) after six months.
Writing the next book is the best way to get through this waiting period. That way if an agent calls and asks what you're writing now, you can give a truthful answer. If no agent calls, you'll soon have another novel to query.
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