I usually recommend folks send out 5-7 at a time, then as a rejection is received, send to the next on the list. This way, if one happens to reject the MS with some feedback, you can make changes before sending it on. If you've sent your MS to 40 agents and agent #2 gives you some sparkling feedback, you can't fix those other 38 submissions.
I sent out in batches of 8-10. That gives you the ability to tweak your query if you get no bites and not have used up all the potential agents. I waited until I got most of them back before sending the next batch. Not every agent responds, but a fair number do.
No, move on
there are 1,000's of agents
and 99.8% are not going
to give you feed back, just
a polite brush off or form letter
rejection.
"It's not right for us"
"We're not taking on new clients"
etc. . .
It's to bad that tens of thousands of
words of work, has to be define
in less then 300. And a missed spelled
word, or comma can be the deciding factor
in acceptance or rejection.
I think the query letter is more important
then the actually novel/book.
Not quite. Depending on your genre, you may only have a hundred or two. And some may be in the same agency where a rejection from one is a rejection from all. Others may be a bad fit, or inappropriate for other reasons. So be careful that you don't run out. Occasionally someone comes up with a hot property that generates multiple offers, but generally it will take several full reads to hit on an agent who likes it enough to take it on. Even Nicholas Sparks, whose first book of fiction sold for a million dollars, only one out of ten agents who requested the full made him an offer. So if you have a hundred agents, shoot for a 10% full request rate, minimum. If you're not getting that, you need to improve your query and/or your opening.
Thank you. I sent out my query to a batch of ten agents. And I just got rejected from one of them.
I've been reading Christian Writer's Market 2009, and I have been using AAR and AgentQuery.
Though the book is more about contacting the publisher than the agent. I am awaiting feedback from both.
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