Queries: Everyone Gets Rejections, But Not Just Rejections

kobold said:

Fiction, btw.

So Jim, do you mean that one could include (provided the submission is to an agency compatible with the subject matter) 'target audience of women ages 18 - 35?' or 'fans of graphic horror' or 'readers of '50 Shades of Grey' in the query?

To this submitter it only makes sense that an agency would expect the author to have a target audience in mind, but on the other hand, some agencies don't ask for it.

I know, each one is different.

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This is only my opinion, and Jim has been active on QLH consistently for years, and has probably seen thousands of letters and dozens or hundreds of successful ones. However, personally, I don't think you need to explain anything about who your audience is beyond the genre of your book when you are querying fiction.

If your book is a dystopian YA, you don't need to tell the agent that you expect it to have crossover appeal and reach adults as well as teens. Everyone writing dystopian YA is hoping to sell to the entire HUNGER GAMES audience. Similarly, if your book is romantic suspense or cozy mystery or a regency romance or a financial thriller, agents and editors have a pretty decent idea of who buys those. You just need to know which of those things your book is.

Grandiosity in describing the market for your book makes you look unprofessional and opens you up to mockery. You really don't want to say: "my book will be beloved by everyone from ages 9 to 90."

Somewhere in your query, there should probably be a sentence like this: "[TITLE] is a [WORD COUNT] [GENRE] that may appeal to readers of [SIMILAR BOOK] and [ANOTHER SIMILAR BOOK]."

That's really all you need to say about audience or marketing in a query.

Cyia said:

You also have to take the market into consideration.

When Twilight hit, it was a novelty of sorts - a PNR for teens that wasn't treated like a bargain bin special. It wasn't a serial set of books like Goosebumps or Fear Street. It was an actual novel, simply spun as something teens, rather than adults, would enjoy. It also filled a bit of the gap being created by the wind-down on Harry Potter. HP's core audience was aging up and publishers were willing to bank on them wanting another long fantasy-style novel to pick up.

Had SMeyer's first book been The Host, things would have played out much differently.

Timing is a factor.

As the PNR wave crested and passed on, dystopian ramped up behind The Hunger Games. A *brilliant* PNR staring weres or vampires that was queried the same day as a *mediocre* dystopian would likely have been passed over in favor of the mediocre book, simply because there was more of a market for it. If you know only one editor is willing to still consider PNR, but there are at least fifteen who have been actively searching for dystopian, then it's only good business sense to lead with the one that's got a better shot.

A lot of authors have stumbled into golden moments because the book they've written can be packaged as something that fits a building, cresting or raging trend.

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Chasing trends, in general is a bad idea, unless you can write a very good book in a couple of months. If you're really lucky and whatever you're already submitting fits into a hot sub-genre, you're lucky, but if you start writing your book when the trend emerges, by the time you submit, the market will be saturated.

There's a limit to how many vampire romances or dystopian YAs or books about the Amish a given editor or imprint can publish, and once those slots are taken, you're really out of luck. After about six months, the thing everybody wants becomes the thing everybody already has or the thing everybody is sick of. On top of that, if editors overpay for some books at the height of the frenzy, and then the books underperform, then everybody is going to be shying away from that.

If you query any agent at any time with something they cannot sell, they will not sign it. If you query an agent who only represents children's books with a very good thriller, she'll reject it because she probably doesn't know editors who acquire thrillers, and they probably don't know her. If editors are telling agents they don't want to see anymore vampires, then the agents aren't going to sign any new vampire manuscripts.

I do think there's a lot of luck involved at the point where your agent submits to editors. For most genres, there are 40 or 50 reputable agents, but you may only get submitted to 6-10 editors at large houses. Most manuscripts represented by good agents are of publishable quality, but there aren't enough slots for all of them. That's where timing a trend right really helps; I think most of the agented dystopian YA manuscripts that were already kicking around at the moment Hunger Games exploded probably sold, but I don't think agents were pulling substandard manuscripts out of the slush because they fit the trend.

That said, if your take on even an overexposed subject is really fresh and your writing is stellar, there's often an opportunity.

Right now, vampires aren't hot the way they were a few years ago, but there may be a few openings for them. All the dystopians and sci-fi YA that were getting bought up a year to eighteen months ago are coming out now, and there's a whole lot of them out, so if you're doing one of those, you might have an uphill battle.

OctoberLee said:

Well in a lottery, you have a little control over your destiny -- you can buy more tickets. If you had a million dollars to blow on lottery tickets, you might have pretty good odds. Heck, if you're doing state lottery, you could pretty much buy it out.

I guess where I really feel it's random -- saw an agent tweet "2% acceptance rate for queries this week." If there were 100 MSs, 10 good ones, and they accepted 2 of those... the odds aren't looking so good, even for the people with the well written manuscript. Better, but still not good. But I do agree it isn't completely luck, and a lot of it does depend on your ability to put together a good query and good opening pages.

Query on and may the odds be ever in your favor!

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If you saw how bad many of the queries are, you'd realize the odds were not so dire.

If you go over to Rejection and Dejection and read the threads about people's queries and stats, you'll see that a number of people are doing a lot better than 2% requests.

Fuchsia Groan said:

This depresses me, because I don't have a great query or sub record, and "It's not the flooded market; you're just not good enough" is tough to hear.

But my results did improve dramatically (from no full requests to several) when I made one key change in my query, so I have to acknowledge something changed there. Basically, over the course of 75 queries, I finally came to understand something about the market. With any luck, I will write my next book for the market rather than for me, and see if I can still sneak some of myself into it and make that work.

Are there any case studies of authors who wrote a series of unsold books only to attain success with the right one? Or, if you can't suss out the market and find the right voice on the first try, does that speak badly of your overall ability? I seem to remember Beth Revis blogging about a succession of ms. that got shelved before she wrote Across the Universe. And Chad Harbach took a long, long time working on The Art of Fielding.

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Numerous writers "trunked" manuscripts before going on to success and bestsellerdom. If you get a decent request percentage from your query+5 pages, that means your concept is marketable and you are competent with written English.

If you've got a little work to do on plotting and voice, that is much easier to refine than the sorts of basic language issues that disqualify most queries from consideration.

Check out this blog: http://slushpilehell.tumblr.com/

The malapropisms this agent highlights are some of the more amusing examples of the defects that are common among submissions. Most people in the submission pool are struggling with the fundamentals of written communication.

kobold said:

Walk back a step with me djf881:

This is only my opinion, and Jim has been active on QLH consistently for years, and has probably seen thousands of letters and dozens or hundreds of successful ones. However, personally, I don't think you need to explain anything about who your audience is beyond the genre of your book when you are querying fiction.

Even if the agency's guidelines state: 'tell us the book's target audience?' There are some out there.

Also, I am vexed when an agency wants to know '. . .all about yourself, your publishing history, what makes you qualified to write this story,' etc. They want to know that I'm a boiler engineer? Published works: 0. What makes me qualified to write a murder mystery/ghost story/doomsday thriller with a nearly all-female cast? That's just how the story came out.

btw, you guys are the incredible best for being so generous with all your info and experience. Every bit helps.

But then, you're aware of that.

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Agencies that represent different kinds of books don't always have different query guidelines for fiction and nonfiction.

The author's platform and credentials matter for nonfiction much more than they matter for fiction.

For certain kinds of nonfiction, like business texts and motivational memoirs, the author's platform as a speaker is a huge component of the publisher's decision to put the book out, since the plan is to sell the book at the author's speeches.

For other kinds of nonfiction, your background matters because it gives you the credibility to talk about the subject. For example, if you are pitching a diet book, it's helpful to be a nutritionist or a doctor.

Platform doesn't matter for fiction. You are pitching a complete work, and the work can be judged on its own merits. Your background can help; if you're writing medical thrillers, it's good to be a doctor.

But you can also write a medical thriller with no medical credentials, and if an agent who represents medical thrillers thinks the book is persuasive enough to sell to her editorial contacts, your credentials don't matter.

My novel, DON'T EVER GET OLD is about an 87 year-old retired policeman who goes hunting for a Nazi fugitive. His age-related medical issues are a big part of the novel; he has early-stage dementia and he's on blood-thinning medication. One of the key dramatic scenes of the novel occurs when a doctor confronts the protagonist with the idea that he needs to be in an assisted-living facility, because his health problems make it unsafe for him to live on his own.

I am a 31 year-old lawyer. I have no experience being 87 years old, and I am not an expert in the medical problems of the elderly. I took a couple of law school classes in criminal procedure, but I have never done any criminal defense or prosecution, and I am not an expert on crime or cops. I've got no credentials to write about fugitive Nazis.

I did a lot of online research and I spoke to a couple of doctors who helped me make sure the medical information was close to accurate. Plenty of writers without police backgrounds write about cops. Plenty of non-lawyers write legal thrillers. People with no credentials related to education or children write books for kids. Non-vampires write paranormal romances. The work is all that matters.

That said, if the query guidelines ask about audience or marketing, a one sentence response to that doesn't hurt.