The "Silent treatment," explained

Another Editor said:

it is best for the publisher or agent to state in their submission guidelines the "best before" date; that is, how many days after something has been submitted will pass before the manuscript can be considered to have been rejected by default.

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This seems the most practical solution. In fact, if all agents did this at least you would know that when you did receive an email in response to a query it would be for a read request. Once an agent requests a partial or full then I feel a writer is owed at least a form rejection.

Actually, it would be pretty easy for a group of agents to get together and have a program written that does all that for them.

Very simple, when they receive the query, they have three buttons. 1) make a request, 2) Hold for further consideration, 3) close this e-mail, move on to the next and send a form rejection. If they selected 2) the program should pop those queries to the top of the e-mail queue in a week, highlighted so the agent knows it's a second-run.

That would save a lot of work and automatically send rejections. It really wouldn't be tough to program either, probably a day's work for someone who knows their way around.

I don't think sending a form rejection would take even 5 minutes, rather a matter of seconds.

Birdy22 said:

I don't think sending a form rejection would take even 5 minutes, rather a matter of seconds.

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Sure, but if you get a ton of queries? Every day? If I was an agent I don't know if I would want to spend my time copying and pasting form rejections. I would probably go for the auto-response saying that I would only respond when interested.

kidcharlemagne said:

Sure, but if you get a ton of queries? Every day? If I was an agent I don't know if I would want to spend my time copying and pasting form rejections. I would probably go for the auto-response saying that I would only respond when interested.

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I'm pretty sure that there are ways to set up an e-mail program that would auto-respond with a form answer without having to copy/paste.

As far as the "no answer means no" policy, I actually don't mind if an agent gives a time frame. What I have seen a lot, though, is that they don't give that, and that's immensely frustrating. There's such a wide range of response times; you would think that within 90 days is standard, but I've had things that have had six months, eight months, year and a half... length of response.

I can understand the agents wanting to avoid argumentative responses from authors and cut down on their time spent on rejections, etc, but at least provide a guideline for the authors' collective sanity.

Thanks for posting this. I've wondered about how agents who don't respond justify that policy to themselves; now I know.

Having been an agent for many years, I totally understand how overwhelming all those submissions can be. They just keep coming and coming, relentlessly, and no matter how much you read, the pile just keeps on growing. Also, rejection hurts, whether you're on the giving or receiving side, which is why agents tend to be well-insulated.

Nevertheless, I find the practice to be rude, disrespectful and dismissive. Agents are so sought after that after a while some start to see themselves as little godlings. In fact, when a writer submits, he or she is making a business proposal, and saying "No thanks," is a minimal courtesy that takes almost no time to carry out. A lot of queries are read and dismissed in just a minute or two, which is how long it takes to see if someone can write or not. (Acceptances take much longer.) It would take an additional few seconds to send out a standardized rejection, which would allow the writer to forget that agent and move on.

When you're a new writer, all that waiting in silence can be agonizing. Yet a "No thanks" opens a door an agent isn't intending to open. All kinds of things wind up being lobbed back at them. Pleas for a second chance. Requests for feedback. Abuse. I can see why many agents don't want to send even a form rejection, if that's what's going to wind up splattering their inboxes.

I'm a big fan of a set time window: If you haven't heard back in two weeks/one month/three months consider it a rejection. That way if you haven't heard back in that time frame you can scratch them off the list.

This "hedging bets" thing sounds silly to me; either they believe they can sell a novel or not. I wouldn't want that agent anyway. It reeks of throwing stuff at a wall to see what sticks.

iRock said:

When you're a new writer, all that waiting in silence can be agonizing. Yet a "No thanks" opens a door an agent isn't intending to open. All kinds of things wind up being lobbed back at them. Pleas for a second chance. Requests for feedback. Abuse.

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Not true in my experience. In the 12 years that I ran my agency, I never got a response like that to a form rejection letter, and I sent out a ton of those. I did sometimes get unwanted correspondence in response to personal rejections, which I sent sometimes to the "Close but no cigar" category of writers. As a result I stopped writing those. But form letters seemed discouraging enough that no writers responded to them.

Letting people know that their submissions aren't right for a particular agent seems to me a matter of respect and courtesy. Why should writers have to sit and stew and wonder, when the agent can respond in a few seconds and let them move on?

Barbara R. said:

Not true in my experience. In the 12 years that I ran my agency, I never got a response like that to a form rejection letter, and I sent out a ton of those.

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Just curious: Were these email or snail mail rejections? Because I think that makes a difference. It's all too easy for the rejected party to hit reply and respond in the heat of the moment.

As I've said before, no one who gets a huge number of e-mails from an unknown source should ever, for any reason, have any kind of auto-respond turned on. The only thing thins does is guarantee you will have a huge spam problem somewhere down the line, and maybe a hacker or two. Your computer can even be turned into a source of spam without your knowledge.

I find nothing rude or disrespectful about the no reply policy. I do find it somewhat arrogant that writers demand a reply. Just because a query may be considered a business proposal does not, in any way, means it's one worth an agent or editor's time.

For queries, this is triply so. No agent or editor anywhere restricts the number of queries a writer sends out, so not hearing from one agent or editor does not mean you can't query another one, or ten others.

And there's always been a rule of thumb timeline. It's two months. If you haven't heard something in two months, consider it a no and move on.

I know from experience that it was tough enough to keep up with submissions twenty years ago. I also know the growing Internet and the fact that everyone now has a computer and a word processor has more than quadrupled the number of people trying to be writers.

Sending rejections is a huge time suck, and nothing technology does changes this. And as this agent says, too many writers simply won't take no for an answer. If every writer behaved, if every writer simply accepted the no and moved on, more agents and editors would send rejections. But writer after writer after writer e-mail back, often several times. Another Huge time suck.

Even writers who think they have to send a thank you for a rejection, and far too many writers do just this, also suck even more time.

If what you submit interests an agent or editor in any way, if she sees any potential, you will hear from her. If it doesn't interest her in any way, if she sees no potential, all you'll get is a no thanks. If a writer can't forget the agent and move on without this, well, that writer isn't cut out for business.

Barbara R. said:

Letting people know that their submissions aren't right for a particular agent seems to me a matter of respect and courtesy. Why should writers have to sit and stew and wonder, when the agent can respond in a few seconds and let them move on?

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Writers don't have to sit and stew. Doing so is a choice, and a poor one.

You may have been able to respond to every query or submission in a few seconds, but I haven't met anyone else that efficient, and I know I never was.

A good agent or editor may receive eight hundred or more queries per week, and if that agent or editor really is a good one, he probably has no more than five or six hours per week to deal with queries, partials, and fulls from new writers.

Even this five or six hours per week often comes late in the evening or on weekends, when the agent or editor should be off the clock.

Agents and editors do need new writers, but finding them is always a secondary priority. Dealing with editors, keeping up with the markets, and handling all sorts of business for the writers they already represent comes first.

If what you send an agent is good, if it shows potential, you will get a reply. If it isn't, the agent is saving herself time, and saving you time, by simply not replying.

iRock said:

Just curious: Were these email or snail mail rejections? Because I think that makes a difference. It's all too easy for the rejected party to hit reply and respond in the heat of the moment.

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Snail mail. There were no email submissions when I was an agent, luckily. You're right, it's easier to respond impulsively via email. It's also easy to hit delete, before or after reading.

Jamesaritchie said:

Writers don't have to sit and stew. Doing so is a choice, and a poor one.

You may have been able to respond to every query or submission in a few seconds, but I haven't met anyone else that efficient, and I know I never was.

A good agent or editor may receive eight hundred or more queries per week, and if that agent or editor really is a good one, he probably has no more than five or six hours per week to deal with queries, partials, and fulls from new writers.

Even this five or six hours per week often comes late in the evening or on weekends, when the agent or editor should be off the clock.

Agents and editors do need new writers, but finding them is always a secondary priority. Dealing with editors, keeping up with the markets, and handling all sorts of business for the writers they already represent comes first.

If what you send an agent is good, if it shows potential, you will get a reply. If it isn't, the agent is saving herself time, and saving you time, by simply not replying.

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No doubt the volume of submissions has increased quantitatively since I was in the business, and that is a problem; certainly it explains why a lot of agents consider new clients only if they're referred by other clients or colleagues. But the time-consuming part of the process is reading queries, synopses, and sample pages. If you're going to consider unsolicited subs, then mailing or emailing a form rejection is the part that takes seconds, and even that is usually not done by the agent herself, but by someone junior.

I can see how this no-response policy saves agents time, but not writers. How long does it take to read, "Thanks for your submission. It's not right for me, but I wish you the best of luck elsewhere"? Less time than the writer spends checking his email twelve times a day, surely.

Not that I'm suggesting anyone sit and wait on one agent's response. There are plenty of fish in the sea, and writers need to have multiple lines out.

Barbara R. said:

Snail mail. There were no email submissions when I was an agent, luckily. You're right, it's easier to respond impulsively via email. It's also easy to hit delete, before or after reading.

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Thanks for weighing in. It's interesting to watch the publishing industry evolve, and writers along with it.

I used to resent the no-response response, but after querying for a while, I learned to shrug it off. But I only worried about counting a no-response as a rejection if that particular agency had multiple agents I wanted to query. Otherwise I left a no-response sub open in my records and went about my business. Occasionally I'd get a rejection (or once or twice a request) long after I'd forgotten about the query.