Virginia Kidd Agency

I have an odd request. Does anyone have the name of a contact person for a publisher query?

As in I am wearing my publishing coordinator hat and need to ask someone at the agency a question about something.

And it's not concerning one of their clients?

I guess I'm resurrecting a somewhat dead thread, but I was wondering if anyone knows if this agency is a "no response means no" for submissions, rather than queries. I got a full request back in May from Christine and it has been radio silence from them ever since, even when I nudged.

Does anyone have any recent experience with this agency?

Hi! I was wondering if anyone might be able to help me in regards to querying this agency. In their guidelines they state they only consider manuscripts in "Standard Industry Format" and then they provide a link as to what they are looking for: http://vk-agency.com/manfmt.html

I have questions regarding two of the requirements in the list (#7 and #8) that I don't quite understand, and I was hoping someone here might know.

The first question is about this requirement:

7. "Hyphenation: don't. The publisher takes care of that."

Do you think they are talking about hyphenated words, (for example: we'd like to take a "dog-friendly" vacation), or just hyphenated words along that are too long for the right side of the page, which makes more sense, since obviously the format would change upon publication?

I was especially concerned about #7, because I have a hyphenated word in my first paragraph.

The other requirement I was unsure of was this one:

8. "Blank lines: center a # character in the line."

Would this include every line in a page break, as in when you are ending a chapter and then starting the next, or just blank lines in text like when jumping from one scent to the next?

Thanks for any thoughts!

DL, I don't have any experience with this particular agency, but my guess would be that you're correct about question 7, and it's referring to breaking up words at the end of a line. It would be very strange to tell the author not to hyphenate any compound words. For question 8, blank lines almost certainly refers to single lines breaking up a scene, not chapter breaks.

ByTXP said:

DL, I don't have any experience with this particular agency, but my guess would be that you're correct about question 7, and it's referring to breaking up words at the end of a line. It would be very strange to tell the author not to hyphenate any compound words. For question 8, blank lines almost certainly refers to single lines breaking up a scene, not chapter breaks.

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Correct. These are fairly standard guidelines, too, so not agency specific. (Though I am a former client, if that makes a difference.)

ByTXP said:

DL, I don't have any experience with this particular agency, but my guess would be that you're correct about question 7, and it's referring to breaking up words at the end of a line. It would be very strange to tell the author not to hyphenate any compound words. For question 8, blank lines almost certainly refers to single lines breaking up a scene, not chapter breaks.

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eqb said:

Correct. These are fairly standard guidelines, too, so not agency specific. (Though I am a former client, if that makes a difference.)

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Thank you both for your responses! I had a feeling about the hyphens, but I never knew about using the # between scene breaks, so it's great to know. I used * * * between scenes in my last MS, and my editor didn't say anything--but we only did the structural edit so far. She's currently working on my line edits, so it may still come up. I'll make sure to change that before I start querying my current project.

eqb: Would you mind if I ask why you left this agency? If you're not willing to share, I completely respect that, but if you are, a private message would be fine.

Thanks again!

DL: We just weren't a good fit any longer.

eqb said:

DL: We just weren't a good fit any longer.

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Thanks for the reply. I hope you went on to find a better fit for you.

D.L. Shepherd said:

Thanks for the reply. I hope you went on to find a better fit for you.

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I did, thank you.

eqb said:

I did, thank you.

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That's awesome! Good to hear.

Does anyone have any recent experiences with these guys? Their submissions schedule is a bit odd: http://www.vk-agency.com/queries.shtml

I sent them a query on August 15th when they first opened and I still haven't heard anything back. Of course, this makes me a bit nervous because it makes me wonder if they're considering it! However, they get barely any submissions on QueryTracker so it's hard to know what to expect with response times.