Less than 2% of manuscripts published.

Shadow_Ferret said:

I don't recall calling the agent incompetent and I was referring to slush pile readers.

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My intention wasn't to call anyone incompetent. It was to show that multiple submissions to even poor selectors of MSs will have the effect of reducing randomness in selection.

If I was reading articles from agents complaining that they were receiving too many quality MSs, that the slush piles were heaving with stuff they'd love to publish but can't, then I'd conclude luck is going to pay a big part in whether you get published. From what I've read, it's not the case, and that implies to me that randomness is not a big factor in publication.

Randomness plays a factor in everything, but there's a HUGE difference between "slightly affected by random chance" and "lottery."

We're already talking about 20% of "not illiterate" novels getting accepted. That's a huge number. Considering that "not illiterate" includes bad, mediocre, good, and great novels, and they obviously don't have the same chance of getting published, it's extremely reassuring.

Analogy:
You're trying out for a basketball team. There are a hundred people there, and there are only two positions. Sounds like it's a crap shoot, right? It would be, if all hundred people were roughly equal. But it's not.

Ninety of those people have not only never played basketball before, but they aren't even in good physical shape. Many of them think they're awesome, though.

Some unknown number of the others have played basketball, but they're lazier than you, and/or they won't listen when the coach tries to teach them better techniques. You'll probably easily beat them as well, so you don't even have to worry. You just need to pay attention to other players who work as hard as you and listened to their coaches. How many people will that be, really? Maybe 3-4 total, including you. Maybe even only two, guaranteeing you a spot.

So, you are really only competing with a tiny number of people for the top two spots. Your chances are very good.

(In other words, 90% of submissions are worthless crap and some unknown but high percentage of the remainder are boring, lazily written, or written by people who won't take advice. If you're a serious writer, you don't have any business being in either of those categories. Serious writers are probably in the top 5% at least, and the top 2% get published. That's some good odds.*)

*Of course, we don't know how accurate the 90% and 2% figures really are. We don't know how much they vary by genre, by the economy, etc. If your passion is historical fiction that's not romance, you're probably going to have a much harder time getting published than average, for example.

... in some ways the lottery comparison holds up, not for any one particular writer, but for all writers, collectively. From that standpoint a (generic) new writer will have a very small chance of succeeding, comparable to winning a lottery, though still of course with better odds of winning. Sure one can improve one's chances by improving at writing and whatnot. But from this collective perspective these chances are distributed equally among all writers, so those opportunities shrink on this abstract plane. I may well be wrong in this, and I also suspect I'm not getting what I mean across. I think though that there's soundness to this line of reasoning. Is there a statitician in the house?

There are lies, there are damn lies and then there are statistics.

I forget who said that.

... statistics are great for predicting the behavior of a group as a whole. When they are used on individuals though the individuals often winds up with raw deals.

If the odds of making it as a writer are 1 in 100,000 for instance, according to statistics, then it is probably true that if you observe 100,000 people who embark on being writers that only 1 will wind up getting published. But if you only observe one individual you may well turn out to be wrong if you apply these same odds to them, because the individual has it within their power to improve those odds by working hard at improving and whatnot.

Ken said:

... in some ways the lottery comparison holds up, not for any one particular writer, but for all writers, collectively. From that standpoint a (generic) new writer will have a very small chance of succeeding, comparable to winning a lottery, though still of course with better odds of winning. Sure one can improve one's chances by improving at writing and whatnot. But from this collective perspective these chances are distributed equally among all writers, so those opportunities shrink on this abstract plane. I may well be wrong in this, and I also suspect I'm not getting what I mean across. I think though that there's soundness to this line of reasoning. Is there a statitician in the house?

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It's valid in that if you pick a submission from the entire group at random, there's a 2% chance it'll be published. However, an individual writer cannot really use it to determine their own chance of success. There's still an element of chance, but there's a completely different (and much more complex) calculation involved for each individual, and the 2% figure doesn't factor in much or at all.

This might be a dubious thing for me to do; it's up to the mods to decide. Here's a link to some lines from a slush pile (Isaac Asimov''s Science Fiction Magazine).

My favorite one:

"Corporeal, we've got to do our best to keep this from the public."
"I know sir, but its already too late."
What do you mean, the general inquired?
"While you were gone I let a curious private in on the secret."
"We've got to stop him."
By now he's long gone. Sorry sir."
"Oh no."

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Ken said:

Is there a statistician in the house?

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There is, kinda-sorta, and I'd like to present the glories of the central limit theorem. There'll be a test later.

So we're all agreed then -- write a damn good novel that grabs the agent/reader/editor by the throat and doesn't let go.

-Derek

dpaterso said:

So we're all agreed then -- write a damn good novel that grabs the agent/reader/editor by the throat and doesn't let go.

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QFT.

EyeSeaAll said:

This might be a dubious thing for me to do; it's up to the mods to decide. Here's a link to some lines from a slush pile (Isaac Asimov''s Science Fiction Magazine).

My favorite one:

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It may be dubious.

But I'm still giggling:

Instinctively, without thinking about it, he grabbed the woman and hugged her and then gave her breasts a couple of playful pinches. "Commander please," she said as she blushed and began yodeling.

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dpaterso said:

So we're all agreed then -- write a damn good novel that grabs the agent/reader/editor by the throat and doesn't let go.

-Derek

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It's taken 12 pages to reveal the obvious?

*headdesk*

I prefer go grab them by the proverbials if it's all the same to you guys.

Wayne K said:

I prefer go grab them by the proverbials if it's all the same to you guys.

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You and me both. But then, that's why I write dirty stuff.

Me too

It was the yodel that tipped me over the edge though. Because that what I do when someone pinches ma boobies. Don't you?

Alright, I've got something of an odd conundrum I'd like to throw in here about improving choices. It's something I've read mixed messages on.

One of the big things we always talk about is doing research. Obviously that's smart. I don't want to send my manuscript to someone who doesn't represent my genre, or someone who isn't accepting submissions. That's mostly because I don't want to waste people's time, but also, it's that odds thing. So I've got a list of about a hundred agents who represent my genre, with those who seem to be the best fits at the top of the list, and those who don't have much information or who represent the genre but focus on other things near the bottom.

How do we reconcile this with agents such as Janet Reid who says that we should query widely, and seems to mean it (I'd have to look up the exact posts again) in terms of "don't worry if you're sending to someone who says they don't represent it." She talks about this as a good way to improve odds. Now obviously query widely is smart, it's that implication, again I wish I knew exactly where it was, that we shouldn't limit ourselves to only the things an agent says he/she is looking for.

Similarly, Nathan Bransford has said when in doubt to query him and to take your chances. The idea there, it seems to be, is that he might find something he loves that he didn't think to say specifically he would represent.

Now, I might be getting these interpretations wrong, and my concern would be annoying an agent with a worthless email and wasting everyone's time, so I can't really imagine doing this, but what does everyone else think? Would it really improve odds to query even questionable fits? Or send a suspense novel to someone who represents mysteries in the off-chance that they might be the one to "fall in love?"

... thanks for the link. The math was a bit over my head, by about 2000 miles, but the article on the central limit theorem was intersting. Really something that it was first discovered back in 1733, by Abraham de Moivre, and the importance of the theorem wasn't recognized til 1901 -- 168 years later! Some did see it for what it was though:

I know of scarcely anything so apt to impress the imagination as the wonderful form of cosmic order expressed by the "Law of Frequency of Error". The law would have been personified by the Greeks and deified, if they had known of it. It reigns with serenity and in complete self-effacement, amidst the wildest confusion. The huger the mob, and the greater the apparent anarchy, the more perfect is its sway. It is the supreme law of Unreason. Whenever a large sample of chaotic elements are taken in hand and marshaled in the order of their magnitude, an unsuspected and most beautiful form of regularity proves to have been latent all along. - Sir Francis Galton (Natural Inheritance, 1889.)

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ps It's best to hone in on the agents that would be most likely to appreciate your ms, Kaitie, at least initially. When/if you exhaust your first choices for agents, then zero in on your second choices that are 'reasonable fits.' Going for 'questionable fits' may be a waste of time, to be honest. And remember, too, you can always write another book if the first one doesn't stir up the type of interest you'd like. G'Luck

Ken said:

ps It's best to hone in on the agents that would be most likely to appreciate your ms, Kaitie, at least initially. When/if you exhaust your first choices for agents, then zero in on your second choices that are 'reasonable fits.' Going for 'questionable fits' may be a waste of time, to be honest. And remember, too, you can always write another book if the first one doesn't stir up the type of interest you'd like. G'Luck

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See that's what I was thinking as well. I suppose I can see the logic...if you aren't getting any bites might as well go ahead and go to the extreme. To me it would be better to just go ahead and wait until the next piece is ready for submitting. Mostly because I imagine if you haven't gotten any bites at that point it's what we've been talking about here...you didn't quite make it into that top 10% or whatever and it still needs work.

Ack this is all so complicated! Actually, I suppose it's not. Just seems that way sometimes.

... and 'the next piece' doesn't take all that long to write, really. Though when you're first starting off on one it does seems like it'll take forever and a day to complete ;-)

Every once in a while, an agent will read a query that just blows them away. Something in the story speaks to them, excites them, intrigues them, etc... and they just have to read more. Every great once in a while, this book is in a genre they don't represent or typically read. But they request it, love it, rep it, and sell it.

I can't think of any specific examples, for some reason, but I've heard of this happening a few times. It's likely one of the reasons Janet and Nathan suggest you query widely. I still agree with the advice that it's best to target agents who rep your genre, but if you absolutely want to work with an agent who does, query them. The chances are very slim, but you just never know.

ChaosTitan said:

Every once in a while, an agent will read a query that just blows them away. Something in the story speaks to them, excites them, intrigues them, etc... and they just have to read more. Every great once in a while, this book is in a genre they don't represent or typically read. But they request it, love it, rep it, and sell it.

I can't think of any specific examples, for some reason, but I've heard of this happening a few times. It's likely one of the reasons Janet and Nathan suggest you query widely. I still agree with the advice that it's best to target agents who rep your genre, but if you absolutely want to work with an agent who does, query them. The chances are very slim, but you just never know.

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I'm one of those examples. My agent only repped very dark noir detective fiction. She took me on for the reasons you stated above. I pinch myself every frikkin day!

ChaosTitan said:

Every once in a while, an agent will read a query that just blows them away. Something in the story speaks to them, excites them, intrigues them, etc... and they just have to read more. Every great once in a while, this book is in a genre they don't represent or typically read. But they request it, love it, rep it, and sell it.

I can't think of any specific examples, for some reason, but I've heard of this happening a few times. It's likely one of the reasons Janet and Nathan suggest you query widely. I still agree with the advice that it's best to target agents who rep your genre, but if you absolutely want to work with an agent who does, query them. The chances are very slim, but you just never know.

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Not that I have any experience in this but I would also think, as many agents know and talk to each other apparently quite regularly, that if an agent loves your book but it isn't something they'd represent but they have a friend-agent who does, they'd be more inclined to suggest you talk to them and even make the extra effort to let their friend-agent know you're heading their way.

Or that's how I like to believe it might work in my world.

I know of one agent in London who passed something on to another in the same agency, so it could happen.

I've had two agents pass my work on to other agents. One of them actually passed it to a guy who turns books into movies. Men in Black and Spiderman jumped out at me You can always get lucky while you work hard.

bearilou said:

Not that I have any experience in this but I would also think, as many agents know and talk to each other apparently quite regularly, that if an agent loves your book but it isn't something they'd represent but they have a friend-agent who does, they'd be more inclined to suggest you talk to them and even make the extra effort to let their friend-agent know you're heading their way.

Or that's how I like to believe it might work in my world.

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I have to say, I think that's highly unlikely to happen. I suspect that for most agents if your query doesn't fit into thier genre they won't even read the sub. They've so little time, and I doubt they'd spend much of it trying to set up other agents with clients :0)