triceretops said:
It looks like the number of fulls read directly corresponds with the number of editorial meetings.
I'd be curious to know how many partials were reaped from that nearly 21,000. Might 1,500 be a good guess?
Hah, the only place where my agent has got her beat is for the number of conferences attended!
I'm wondering if about 21,000 writers were looking for agents last year. It stands to reason that Nelson is a large, well known agency, and that anybody with any knowledge or taste might have gone after her. Anyway, it gives some perspective on what the competition is like. You would expect newer or smaller boutique agencies to have lower query numbers for the year, of course.
21 books sold sounds like that number might be close to half her client list, although I'm not certain how many she and her associates represent.
I think I'm most surprised by the 65,000 copies of one title sold. Is that for the year only? I would have expected a higher seller to take the number one position. I would call that a very strong mid-lister in MMPB.
Interesting stuff. She was quite nice/relaxed to post those figures.
Tri
I doubt it.. A partial takes some time and committment to read. 1,500 is a huge number. No agent I've had could possibly read so many. Many agents have only one or two days per weeks to read queries, partials, and manuscripts. No agent I've had has ever requested more than a couple of hundred partials over the course of a year, tops.
I assume a new agent with no real stable, or a small agent with a small stable, would be able to request a large number of partials, but partials really do take a lot of time, and when you consider all else an agent has to do with her time, well.
The one thing I know for certain is that there were one heck of a lot more than 21,000 writers looking for agents last year. I mean, I wish the number was so small.
At any given time there are six million unpublished novels floating around out there. I doubt anyone knows how many of tehse writers are looking for an agent at any given time, but it's a sizeable percentage. Certianly in the high hundreds of thousands. There are some 1,500 agents out there, and most of them are swamped, many much more so than ths agency.
Simultaneous submissions make up a good percentage of what they see, but most of the slush doesn't overlap, and even what does overlaps with only a few other agencies.
If no more than 21,000 writers were looking for agents, then gettign an agent would be easy.