Request rates on query letters

I think 40% is a good result on a query. I doubt that working on it more will significantly increase that percentage. I'd be looking at what's not clicking with the partials and the full. Have you posted the opening on SYW? If not, that's what I'd think about doing.

Are you getting comments? Those might give you some hints.

Best of luck,

Jim Clark-Dawe

Forty sounds pretty good to me.

I had one query letter where I sent out 5, and 4 came back with requests. I was flying high.

Until I sent out more queries...turns out I'd just been lucky.

donut said:

What's a good ratio of rejection to request for a query letter?

After a good deal of painful rewriting and reworking, I think my novel is ready to go out again. I have a query letter (posted here) that I've sent out previously -- between 2/07 and 10/07, I sent it out to 23 agents and got positive replies (requests for partials or fulls) from 9 of those. So... that puts me at about a 40% success rate (for the query -- the ms is another problem).

My question: should I rework the query for this pass, or is this success rate about as good as I'm likely to get?

Thanks for any and all opinions/experience.

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Well, let me start by saying that I'm predisposed to agents who take sample pages, or even those who take the first three chapters/first 50 pages, so my sample of those who are query only--which seems to be the audience you are aiming at--is skewed. That is, when I was in agent-getting mode, the majority of queries I sent out included partials. I don't know who all these query-only agents are or what their motivations are, but good fiction writing is obviously pretty damn low on their priority list, so they are low on my list.

Oops. Sorry. Ranting.

In any case, it varies by category and how many book they publish in your genre. Based on the folks I know, I'd say you'd be batting low in Romance, and high in a lot of other areas. So chances are, you're doing pretty well. Congrats.

My philosophy, for what it's worth:

If they don't specify "query-only," send pages. That assumes that your pages are really good. If your pages aren't good, then please don't query at all. Go write better pages.

Sounds like you're off to a great start. But if people take pages initially, send them--it saves a whole step, and rewards agents who actually care about writing.

jclarkdawe said:

I think 40% is a good result on a query. I doubt that working on it more will significantly increase that percentage. I'd be looking at what's not clicking with the partials and the full. Have you posted the opening on SYW? If not, that's what I'd think about doing.

Are you getting comments? Those might give you some hints.

Best of luck,

Jim Clark-Dawe

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Actually, I don't think it's clear that something isn't clicking--unless I read it wrong, it doesn't sound like there's been any real responses yet after the partials.

Good rate. Haven't read your q but it's gotta be fine for that rate. I think my second time around, I had less than 30% request, about 60% of those asking for the full and I was happy with that rate (it got me Big Deal ag in about 4 months).

David's right--send pages (first 5) with *any* query.

1) Good on you for sending pages.

2) I think you're doing pretty well.

3) When it rains it pours.

I queried 20 agents and received six requests for partials/fulls, which I thought was pretty good, so your 40% is nothing to shake a stick at.

If you're a fantastic writer, it's one-to-one.

But please, don't keep track of numbers like that, your head will explode.

You just keep sending out until the work clicks with someone.

Over a two year period--with constant rewrites--I sent countless queries for an equal number of rejections. The first agent who looked at it (and rejected it) later became a scammer with Edit Ink. The first publisher who liked it went backrupt before I could send the full MS.

But the next time out (and I was thoroughly discouraged by then) it sold.

That made up for everything.

Keep writing, keep tweaking. Make sure the first chapter will distract a slush pile reader from a subway full of muggers. Do that and you'll have a sale.

Good luck!

Realize this is resurrecting an old thread, but I thought this might be of interest to some. I've conducted a poll on Twitter asking writers agented in the past 5 years about their request rate for "The Query That Worked." The results are pretty diverse, which is interesting/encouraging!

Results Here:

https://twitter.com/CarissaATaylor/status/724692000100880384

Not a number but...

If you have properly targeted your query and your list of agents, you will get a higher positive result rate than a random shotgun approach. Spammers send out 100,000 emails and maybe 100 reply. That's fine for them. For writers, there are far fewer than 100,000 agents who handle your type of work. Be cautious in your research and you'll get the best response possible for your effort.

Jeff

Request rates have nothing to do with percentages, averages, or anything else except the combination of quality, and knowing who you're querying. If you have a really good query letter and first pages, and know what the agent you're querying likes, your request rate should be darned near one hundred percent. If you don't know these things, your request rate will be anywhere form zero on up to fifty percent, depending on how much natural talent and instinct you have.

No agent or editor says no to a well-written query that shows her the novel is what she likes, written the way she likes. Being able to do this is not an accident, has nothing to do with averages, percentages, or by guess and by golly.

Shady Lane said:

Forty sounds pretty good to me.

I had one query letter where I sent out 5, and 4 came back with requests. I was flying high.

Until I sent out more queries...turns out I'd just been lucky.

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Something similar happened to me. Got a full request, then the next thirty gave me form rejections. Sigh.